“It’s all possible.” I sighed. “None of this is contradictory. Gatherings of people scattered around the globe. Some of them maybe in quite excellent health. Anyone disagree with that general assessment?”
I waited. No one spoke.
Abruptly, perhaps from feeling pushed against the wall, nowhere to turn, having to strike back myself, something hard and angered—by what I could not tell, perhaps only at the way things were—arose in me.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, there are probably a few people back home. In fact there’re probably a number of these ‘pockets’ scattered God knows where.” I spoke brutally. “We can’t simply go up and down the earth, looking for them. Not in the light of what Mr. Melville has just told us. Did everyone hear him? And if everyone did, is anyone suggesting we start some sort of fucking treasure hunt to find as many of those pockets as we can before our fuel runs out and we end up wallowing in some sea somewhere?”
“No, Captain,” Chatham said. “Only at home.”
I regretted already that outburst. “Gentlemen, ladies, I apologize to all of you for my language.”
I could hear the rain begin. We would never be satisfied unless we had a look. Yes, an immensely powerful argument. I had to give him that. But what would the price be? No man should be given that choice, no group of men. No, not even Navy men, in whose lexicon no words stood higher than the ones he had uttered. Duty. Responsibility. Then I heard Chatham, something insinuating and sly in his voice:
“Captain, there’s something that hasn’t been mentioned. The Bosworth NCA signal: It’s as much as an order to go home. By that very designation. National Command Authority—the highest. Using TSP ciphers. In addition to that, Navy people are obviously sending it, doing the transmitting. Navy message form. Navy code security procedures—changed every twenty-four-hour day. Just as the Navy does.”
He had come on stronger than I had ever known Chatham to do, and done so shrewdly, employing what seemed to be forceful evidence. Had come on also, I had to admit, with every sense of personal conviction in the right of what he was saying. But there was something more to come. A great deal more. He paused in the gathering silence, for all the world like the gunnery officer he was, waiting until his target came dead in the cross hairs. Then he let go.
“If we can’t take orders from the Navy—not to mention the National Command Authority—from whom, in God’s name, are we to take them? I don’t think it’s time for Navy ships, Navy officers, any Navy command whatsoever, to start disobeying Navy orders.”
So here it was, at last. Slowly my eyes came back from looking at the sea to looking point-blank down the table at the CSO. I became aware that a peculiar tenseness had invaded the wardroom, penetrated the last one of the officers, their eyes, all of them, looking up the table at me, expectant; every officer as aware as I was myself of the implications in his words: the first open questioning of my authority; not direct, but a manifest testing of the waters. A silence unlike any other held sway with something of fear and shock in it, something absolutely ominous. No sound save that of the augmenting rain drilling down into that atmosphere. How clever that was of him to save it until the last, like a surprise witness. Myself knowing that it was the last possible choice of a moment to seek confrontation; knowing as well that I must not altogether let it pass. I listened to the rain.
“There’s weather coming,” I said. “We have but a few moments. As to your point, Mr. Chatham, naturally the captain of this ship will decide whom, if anyone, we are to obey. All others need be concerned only with obeying him.”
“Of course, Captain. I meant only . . .”
I cut that off. “I think we’ve pursued the matter sufficiently for today, Mr. Chatham. You’ve made your various points.”
Somehow then looking down the length of the wardroom table to where those two always sat, mute, the Jesuit at its very end, facing me, the doc to his left, thinking I never knew what with either. I should mention that in these officers’ meetings, neither ever volunteered an opinion—each had to be explicitly asked for one; this not a peculiarity of theirs, rather the way of Navy chaplains, Navy doctors, their area of authority lying in healing, one physical the other spiritual, not in the decisions to be made as to the ship’s course and action, these matters the Navy in its wisdom reserving for officers of the line. Nevertheless, seeking counsel wherever it might be found, something making me ask.
“Doc?”
“I’m not sure it makes sense,” he said. “But I feel we have to go home.”
“Commander Cavendish?”
He waited a moment, a man who by vocation and choice heard far more words than he spoke, these always offered with the least of portentousness. “Not much, Captain. It seems pretty clear: the question, I mean, not the answer. Mr. Chatham speaks of duty, of responsibility. They’re the right words. I might suggest that we give more thought to what the fulfillment of those two really consists of, in our special circumstance . . .”
An immense scar of lightning flashed across the starboard port, the following thunder breaking directly above the ship, for a moment silencing all talk. In our special circumstance. The words striking into me with the quickness of the lightning flash, words entering me both as sword and as comforter . . . the weather had stopped him, or he had stopped anyhow. No time now to attend to them in any case. For suddenly I was paying heed to the ship. I looked now with intention through the ports upon a whitening sea; listened now not idly but with a seaman’s ear: The roll accompanied by a deepening pitch as she moved into the troughs, the ship slower in coming up. I glanced at Chatham, at Bainbridge, attempting to assess my own assessment of these two curiously allied officers. Together they were a considerably potent force in shaping the opinion, the sense, of the ship. Their motivation to my mind as far apart as could be. Bainbridge: simply innocent hope. Chatham: From whom are we to take orders. And the other: It’s what the crew wants. The two phrases seemed coupled, part of one thing, bringing altogether near the one terrible danger of all. Control of this ship: that was the missile officer’s intent, the sea herself seemed to speak to me, telling me so; secretively reserving any answer to that other question: to do what with? Not just to take her home: Nothing could convince me the intent stopped there. Control of her, her immense striking power: That was his every purpose. I came away from this. I must have felt that their position had to be given its every shot; we could not turn our back on it; not yet. I had the deepest fear of the consequences should I do that. Added to all this, surely, that long and almost unbearable talk of home. Almost helplessly I turned to the communications officer.
“Mr. Bainbridge,” I said. “Concerning Bosworth, Missouri, here it is. The wraps are off. You may identify ourselves, our position, tell them anything else you judge might elicit an intelligible response. Prepare and show me the messages. Starting right now. Get cracking.”
Even as I rose, from down both sides of the wardroom table, the officers of the USS Nathan James, heads turned, half of them right, half left, all, including Bainbridge, looking at me with the one expression of startlement, as if it were the last decision they expected from me. Then the communications officer found his voice, a miraculous lift in it.
“Aye, sir. Immediately, Captain.”
Almost as if synchronously, the elements let loose. A great blaze of lightning shot through the ports, filled the wardroom; the following thunder breaking close aboard. The ship shuddered through a sudden pitch, trembling and lurching as she moved into the valleys of the sea, the sound of wind and waves rising above the ventilation and machinery noise. Then, tired of waiting, the torrents of rain exploded and began to hammer the ship. Jennings, the junior officer, moved quickly to close the ports without being told to do so.
“I think the ship needs us,” I said, rising. “Let’s batten down.”
* * *
I listened to that plaintive sound, forever mysterious and poignant to sailors, of rain falling into the sea, quietly now, haunting a
s chords in a requiem; the mists hanging low in the water, visibility no more than a couple of ship’s lengths; the ship seeming to move through a void of nothingness; now and then a low soughing of wind as from sentient beings emerging from the spectral darkness. I looked up: masthead and range lights barely penetrating the haze. I had stayed for the changing of the watch; stepped then from the pilot house onto the starboard bridge wing for this final captain’s check, after the strong weather we had been through over the past hours, before making below for my bunk.
The day had seemed forever, the emotion of the wardroom lingering, heart still rended by what my officers had had to be put through, the thoughts of home from that stronghold box where they had so long resided in silent agony ever since the launching in the Barents now forced brutally into the open; each officer forced at last to think, in considering our decision, of his own hometown, what it might be like there, was anyone alive in any one of them, was one of these a wife, a daughter, a son . . . a father, mother, sisters, brothers . . . if so, what might be their condition . . . torment added upon torment until at last the intolerable memories, thoughts, feelings, the whole great horror was stuffed almost violently back into its locker. Not all achieving this success. Later, walking along the passageway in officers’ country to my cabin, I had heard from behind two closed stateroom doors the sounds of sobbing; hesitated, hand almost coming up to knock softly; continued on. Chatham had spoken well into that awful tide of remembrance; his argument had every worth argument could have: We would never be satisfied until we had seen it with our own eyes. It was wisdom itself; the words, once uttered, became something like a commandment, engraved in stone, haunting the mind. As for myself, I had no one to go home to, not any longer, and quite often I had felt that this constituted my chief strength. I was not at all certain I would have possessed the courage of my own officers, having others—wives, children—back there and yet with every fortitude carrying on, fulfilling their duties. A wave of the most intense respect and affection for them held me for a moment in the night. Who could now blame them if they came down on Chatham’s side? To go see with their own eyes; even, as the Jesuit had said a time back, if it meant seeing the nail prints in the hands, the spear wound in the side. Who was I, lacking their motivation, their desire like the passion of the Lord, to oppose them? The thought seemed to lead directly to what the Jesuit had said this day.
It had happened so quickly, filtered even so through arriving weather, the sudden realization that the ship was signaling her need for us in her battle with the sea . . . so quickly that only blurred impressions remained as evidence. Said what he had said, stopped there. But I felt I heard it as much as if he had said it directly into my ears. Himself knowing that he did not need to do that in any detail, knowing that a mere signal would suffice; knowing the fact to be long deep as could be in me, buried beyond the reach of any Fathometer, any determination as to the matter lying after all across far seas, thoughts as to it easily postponable, other urgent decisions daily upon one . . . his knowing also, and this the intent of that signal lest by any chance I miss it, that now something vital to it had arrived—we could not do both, not fulfill both obligations, duties. That was what he was saying. The choice as to direction the ship would take for the first time forcing those other competing considerations up into realms of consciousness, terrible and impermissible thoughts, one wanted to scream to them to go away, thoughts not fair to thrust upon any man, least of all upon a ship’s captain who did not want them, a mere mortal, who had crushing in upon him enough other insistences to test all his capabilities, this being the last ever to be one of them. Even the Jesuit, surely morally the bravest of men, pausing as in some sort of cowardice, and of fright, before them, the words unwilling to come off his tongue, managing only those two it seemed everyone was mouthing. Duty. Responsibility. And I knew: His concept of those two words had nothing whatever to do with Chatham’s about going home. God’s will, he might have added—though he seldom used such expressions—if something, the weather or his own fears, had not halted him from saying the other. We have the means. Who else for sure that we know of does? I would never have added that codicil of his, having ceased to believe in such words, such expressions as—God; in such phrases as “the higher purpose” I had heard him use, if only once or twice. They were not for me, not any longer; other than that, knowing, and for the first time, that the Jesuit’s unspoken question was in all truth the real question I must now decide; not wives, children, brothers, sisters, at best their corpses perhaps to see, at worst replications of those half-living half-dead beings, creatures, wretches, no nomenclature as yet having been invented for them, their species being so new, first seen on the beaches of Amalfi; our just fate surely not to go see those now on the beaches of Virginia and the Carolinas, of Massachusetts and Maine; not to go back and in some form of suttee, throw ourselves on their funeral pyre. I remembered now that single time, when with a strange, seemingly offhand lightness that later I was to look upon as almost eerie, he had said, “Naturally these men are under my spiritual care . . .” A single beat of a pause: “. . . these women.” From any ship’s captain’s point of view, ship’s company being the correct designation, the last seeming utterly unnecessary, even offensive: Why these women? As though some new category, meriting an extra measure of that care; a distinction for the same eternal reason unacceptable. For a moment I forced the matter, despite my tremblings, into direct thought. Phraseology different, coming at it from polarly opposite bearings, Jesuit and myself, our objective: Could it have been more identical? Did it not have to be? The single consideration before which every other purpose, hope or desire had to give way? Was anything else thinkable? Any truth existent other than that nothing on earth be permitted to stand in the way of it, least of all the relatively inconsequential opinions or trifling desires of men that we go this way or that? Standing alone in the night, I knew it for the first time, in a kind of Damascene clarity, forced in that light myself to embrace it as our sole purpose; feeling the pale rain falling on me. And felt an absolute terror. Not believing any longer in God, it was as though I had become God myself. The final decision now almost easily made, as I suppose decisions are for God. I would give Bosworth until Suez, with our own new forthrightness, to tell us something besides gibberish: by that time also the southern shore of the Mediterranean having given us by then its own final answer as to habitability. If negative on both, assemble the men.
I turned out of the rain, passed through the pilot house, exchanged a pleasantry with Lieutenant Sedgwick, the OOD, and made my way below to my bunk; feeling utter calm, falling into instant sleep, the rain heard but as a soothing patter on the weather surfaces of the ship all around me.
9
The Desert
It all began with the R and R stop.
Now and then we stopped at a beach to get some exercise and to have what was best described simply as an outing. We badly needed outings. We had a certain amount of sports equipment: a half-dozen footballs; three volleyballs, I believe, and a net; a dozen softballs and a half-dozen bats. Touch football was the game of choice, having the virtue of accommodating any number of players and degrees of skill. Lieutenant (jg) Selmon always went ashore first to take his readings and to report back either that the place was unsuitable or that it was good for two to five hours as the case might be.
For some time now, finding a place had not been an easy thing. For a considerable stretch the coastline all along Algeria and Libya had exhibited a prohibitively high reading. I felt we rather desperately needed some R and R and proceeding on our ever-easterly course across the blue void of the Mediterranean we made frequent stops in search of a place for it. Finally down the coast, not too far away now from Tobruk, Selmon came back from one of his forays with the glad tiding that a touch football game of up to four hours would be acceptable on a stretch of white beach which we could see across the water. Vigorous exercise does wonders for sailors long shipbound, especially if it invo
lves fun as opposed to the universally loathed calisthenics. True sailors have astonishingly little need to stop on shore but all need to stop some, after which they are all—I have not known a single exception to this rule—delighted, rather relieved, to get back aboard their ship, their secure home. The boats were quickly lowered away and soon had ferried ashore all but a skeleton crew for this welcome diversion. Before long, goal lines had been emplaced in the form of a derelict and weathered windlass, let go from some long-ago ship, we found on the beach for one, and a large piece of whitened driftwood we found for the other. Two teams were loosely constructed along the general lines that divide a ship’s company: those who work on the weather decks and those, such as the snipes, whose naval lives are spent deep in the ship, out of sight of wind and wave. With certain further arbitrary divisions of those who work between these two, the radiomen and messmen, for example, being assigned to the deck team and the combat information and weapons people to the snipes. Nonplayers constituting the cheering section and cheering section and players alternating from time to time as the desire struck them.
It was a pleasant if barren setting, suffused in peace and quietude, devoid of any evidence of incursions man may have one time made on it. The beach was of an exceptionally soft sand and white as bleached bones. I was struck by its almost immaculate cleanness, its virtual absence of kelp. One way it sloped down into a blue-green water of a particular clarity and, under still heavens, as untroubled as some lagoon. In the other direction it met the great desert; the endless sands unbroken, varied only in the majestic and corrugated dunes that rose to break its awesome and forbidding sameness like high waves breaking across a silent sea. It stretched away beyond us like a mighty sea itself, a sea of sand extending to the farthest horizon, in a solemn and immense loneliness, with a nobility and greatness of its own. The tawny desert sands, an indigo sea, the sky of paler blue: These three constituted entire the universe at this stop in geography, they and our ship standing consolingly off in the near distance. Even the one thought that troubled me whenever I left the ship scarcely touched my mind looking at her now. I had made it a practice not to be long from the ship at a time, out of a vague but always existent fear that some gathering, some quickly arranged cabal might seize her and take her on a destination that differed from that intended by myself, that she might sail off toward the western horizon before my very eyes. Today—feeling because so many of ship’s company, including her CSO, were ashore that such an act was scarcely manageable—that fear lay far away, overwhelmed by a sense of ease I had not felt in weeks.
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