My finger left that place, moved, slowly, on a westerly course, into another ocean, came down on another dot, on our last remaining chance for fuel.
“Guam,” I said. “Also had a submarine tender stationed there. Storing nuclear rods.”
Even as I named the island, something hopeless and unforgiving stirred in my memory. It was also a mammoth Navy base, second largest of them all across the seas. When Magellan found it, he had started something for future generations of sailors—American—that he could not have imagined. Over the years the island had become virtually a Navy principality, as Navy as Annapolis, the Chamorro people the most U.S. Navy body of human beings anywhere; working for the Navy; their men entering the Navy. The Navy-Chamorro symbiosis was a thing all its own. On another ship I had put in there many times. A people gentle, quite lovely, altogether intelligent, with a pretty island, much larger than most, that rose from green-on-azure waters unsurpassed in all the vast Pacific. On its acreage, what the Navy didn’t have, the Air Force did. The long-range bombers. The missile-launching sites. I straightened up a bit, still letting my finger rest there. Things had to be said.
“Guam. That place was the biggest supply dump for hydrogen bombs, other nuclear armament, of any place outside the U.S.A.”
“I’ve heard that, sir.”
“It’s true. I saw it.”
“Did you, sir.”
Selmon’s voice was bright-toned, that of an apt pupil hearing his archaeology professor describing some historic dig he had been a part of. I remembered. Selmon at least seemed to want to hear it. And for this briefing, it needed to be put anyhow.
“They took a bunch of us nuclear captains there to see it. Racked up in those tunnels they cut into the hills, then concreted. All of them perfectly camouflaged—driving by, you’d see nothing but breadfruit trees. Then in the tunnels hundreds of those things. Thousands. They should have renamed Guam—Redundancy Island. Enough on that one island to blow up the universe, say six hundred times over. No island anywhere was anything like what Guam had become. Even more nuclear fuel waiting for us on Guam. We could pick up enough of it to go on forever . . .”
I stopped. In the realization, like a streak-through of horror, come and gone, that every word I said condemned Guam.
“So we can safely assume that Guam and Diego Garcia got scratched pretty early?”
“It would be a natural thing, sir,” Selmon said. “I can’t imagine them so stupid as not to get those two right off. The first wave of missiles, probably.”
“Well, they weren’t stupid,” I said. “At least not in that way.”
“No, sir. I don’t think they were that kind of stupid,” Selmon said wryly.
“The breadfruit trees,” I said absently, as if I had not heard a word he said. “I never saw so many breadfruit trees either, as on Guam. It’s a wonderful food. Quite interested me. A man could almost live off breadfruit . . .”
I stopped, shocked at my own meandering, and the silence hung. Selmon’s voice came through the dark, a touch of alarm in it did I fancy? I felt he was looking curiously at his captain.
“Sir, I’d say to stay as far away from that place as possible. It’s had it, sir.”
I smiled distantly. “Don’t worry, Mr. Selmon. We shall not go to Guam.”
Our minds ceremonially interred Guam—more accurately, left it a seared hump rising from the Pacific blue. For a moment more: I remembered good swimming at Guam, Tumon Bay, the water clear and sparkling a hundred feet down. I laughed abruptly, sensing that this startled my officers, as well it might, a spectral laugh to my own ears.
“Gentlemen, I was just thinking. The very first bomb, that toy, the Hiroshima one, took off from Tinian, sister Marianas island, right next door to Guam, as we all know. I was just thinking something extremely banal. The same thing perfected a thousandfold coming back to exterminate the place that first sent it off. Mr. Bainbridge.”
“Sir?”
“The communications situation with Guam?”
“Same as Diego Garcia, sir. Often tried. Nothing raised.”
I revved back, composed and analytical. “Then that is that.”
Diego Garcia . . . Guam. They seemed our last bets for nuclear fuel replenishment; the urgency of thinking of a reachable place that would take us in so suddenly enhanced.
“Gentlemen, I would say we were looking for a place so useless, worthless, good-for-nothing, far from anything that was anything, that absolutely nobody could find any good and logical reason, or any reason at all, to do away with it—in short, the dregs, or at least the ends, of the earth. Would you agree, Mr. Selmon?”
“From a radiation standpoint, sir,” the young officer said, “you probably couldn’t describe it better.”
Now we bent over again, studying the Mercator projection Thurlow had laid out of the Southern Hemisphere. We commenced looking for tiny dots on vast reaches of ocean. Selmon had educated me: the smaller the body of land, the more surrounded by water, the farther away from any mainland, the greater the chances of habitability. Thus—if we should find nothing else—minds searching with fierce diligence for that one point of earth set somewhere in millions of square miles of ocean that would receive us, sustain us: some last resort to fall back on if need be. We peered at minute and faraway clusters in the two ocean vastnesses, as if one might say, “Come here.” The chart spoke not at all. I turned to the navigator.
“Mr. Thurlow,” I said, “I want you to prepare a list of every island found on any chart of these regions, the list to have one restriction: to qualify, it has to be distant from any conceivable target. Then find out everything you can about it. From the hydrographic charts and studies in our marine shelf. Also we’ve got the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The climate. What might grow there. The place mustn’t have too many people. And what people they do have, their nature and characteristics. Not of a hostile enough character, or in numbers sufficient to overwhelm the ship. Whatever you can find. All you can find.”
“I understand, sir. Captain?”
“Yes, Mr. Thurlow.”
“The best place of all might be a place that is off the map. One completely unknown to geography. Some island listed nowhere. There are always such places. Places passed by. Uninhabited places. Some of them very possibly capable of supporting men; determined men.” He waited a second, adding curiously, “And women. By definition, places that no one got around to simply because they were so out of the way—out of the mainstream. Of trade routes, commerce, of the normal sea-lanes—of no imaginable potential, strategic or tactical. And thus directly to our purpose. Not necessarily bad places in themselves.” I heard a slight, sardonic laugh. “Grass grows on them, that is. Not at all necessarily sandspits.”
We paused before this portrait. Lieutenant Thurlow: Some of his speculations I had found to my own mind remote, unrealistic; but others, ones no one else thought of or imagined, in the event turning out to be true. There was a considerable silence. Then Selmon, in tones of rather wry musing:
“You know what would probably be the best bet of all, sir?” Startling us, the radiation officer gave an abrupt laugh of his own—coming more seldom, more sardonic than Thurlow’s, that of a man who saw life as it was. Selmon’s hand reached out; hesitated, hovering over the chart like a blessing and a hope; then the forefinger poked out and landed on a larger place deep in the chart; as far down, in fact, as you could go.
“Antarctica. It just might be the one place to remain free of any fallout—now or forever.”
Weirdly the adverb, one become strange to us, seemed to give back an echo. It required verification. I turned toward him.
“Did you say ‘forever’?”
“It’s possible, sir. Nothing certified on these things, as we know, but . . . I’ve been doing the calculations. There’s quite a fair chance that it would have all dissipated before it reached there; using up itself on the rest of the earth; the main point being that the air flow into Antarctica from anywhere else is so
small that there is nothing or very little the contamination could travel on.”
“That’s rather sweet to visualize, Mr. Selmon.”
“Not so strange that it would come through. Really the one faraway place. The North Pole: it’s actually quite close to places inhabited by man. Why, we know the Russians actually stationed ballistic-missile submarines right beneath the Arctic ice pack. The Arctic’s got people. The Antarctic couldn’t be more different. No people. Surrounded by the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian oceans coming together—separated from other continents by hundreds of miles of open sea, the place utterly remote. In the Arctic, ice starting at the seventieth parallel; the Antarctic the fiftieth. In fact the Arctic would have been one of the first places to go—those Russian subs if nothing else. Not a doubt that the Antarctic will be the last—if it goes at all.”
“Quite within the realm of possibility,” Bainbridge put in. “As a matter of fact, when I was stationed in the Pentagon—I suppose I can let the rest of you in on this now,” he said, in a rare witticism for the communications officer, “I was put in a Navy section called PNW—for Post-Nuclear World. The very existence of the damn section was itself so classified that we had a joke about our studies being so top secret as to be stamped ‘Burn Before Reading.’”
Bainbridge received with a smile the small ripple of laughter. “Anyhow, one idea given a very serious consideration was the positioning of something called a ‘Mobile Continuity Force.’ The idea was to create a task force of vessels built solely for the purpose and cram them with all imaginable survival gear and personnel . . . food, clothing, medicine, tents . . . doctors, nurses, mobile hospitals, ambulances . . . grain and vegetable seeds, fertilizers . . . Jeeps, landing craft, helicopters . . . standing ready to take all this to pockets of survivors who might just be around here and there in the United States. Plans even called for each ship’s company being composed half of men, half of women: In case there was nobody left, they could procreate all by themselves. Having built this task force, the idea was to pick the place on earth most likely to survive all-out nuclear attack. There was no argument as to what that place was. The vessels were to be stationed in the South Polar Sea—however great the fallout everywhere else, contamination there being either of low intensity or nonexistent.”
We all listened with fascination to this account of the communications officer’s former duty. I softly put a question into the absolute silence.
“And what happened to that particular Pentagon plan, Mr. Bainbridge?”
“Well, Captain, the Joint Chiefs shot it down. Two reasons. In the event of that kind of attack the whole country, they figured, would be so contaminated that the ships couldn’t get anywhere near it for a couple of hundred years or so. The other was that building and positioning those ships, so they reasoned, would signal to the Russians and everybody else that we believed we could survive a nuclear confrontation; contradicted the reigning philosophy of mutual assured destruction—that a nuclear war was unwinnable. While they were about it, they deep-sixed the whole damned section as being too dangerous just sitting around thinking up things like that and sent us all to sea.”
“At least, Whitney,” Thurlow put in, “there was the favorable result that otherwise we would never have had the pleasure of having you aboard.”
“A very handsome compliment, Mr. Thurlow. I thank you very much.”
We sat for a moment in silent contemplation of these revelations.
“Well, now,” I said. “The South Polar Sea is still there. And so is Antarctica. If those predictions on which that fascinating contingency plan was based of a . . . What did you say that thing was called, Mr. Bainbridge?”
“Mobile Continuity Force, sir.”
“Typical Navy nomenclature. If the predictions of low or noncon-tamination in fact hold . . .”
I paused in this fancy.
“There’s just one drawback,” Thurlow said. “For us personally, I mean. I doubt if men can live on nothing but fish.”
“No, I suppose they couldn’t,” I said vaguely. The mind made a movement. Half the mind went off somewhere, to attend to something, I couldn’t tell what. “I hear it’s pretty cold there, too.”
“Yes, sir. I just felt to mention it—Antarctica. Meantime, that place,” Selmon said, “—assuming that good thing occurs—will have to remain in the hands of those that have it now.”
“Those that have it now, Mr. Selmon?”
“Penguins and sea leopards, sir,” the radiation officer said. “Especially penguins. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They have a good shot—just my opinion—of not being touched at all. To go right on living as if nothing had ever happened. Maybe—except for a few bugs around the earth—the only thing that will. Penguins may very well own the earth; presently if not already. What’s left of it.”
“Penguins and sea leopards,” I said absently, my mind still preoccupied as though trying to identify an elusive object. “Imagine penguins and sea leopards outlasting the whole works. Well, probably they deserve to. Especially penguins. I don’t think they ever hurt anybody.”
“No, sir. They’ll probably wonder—from time to time—why men don’t come around anymore. Gawking at them and taking their pictures. Then they’ll just shrug and go on like always. If penguins shrug.”
All this was decidedly loquacious and nonscientific for Selmon, who generally stuck to the technical facts. His having let go, it seemed to encourage another county to be heard from; with that sanguine and ironic air it had.
“If penguins survive, it’ll mean the new evolution can start that much further along,” the voice said almost cheerfully, as if there was nothing without its bright side. “Instead of with one-cells. Puts everything a few million years further ahead, right? I wonder what’ll evolve from penguins?”
That was Thurlow. “Yes. Well, now. Shall we get off the penguins and back to us?” I said.
* * *
That night I could not get Antarctica out of my mind. If Selmon’s suppositions fell in . . . A very fat hypothesis to be sure. And yet. Was there some way? Some way, finding it true, we could possibly make it there? I started with known assets. We were a ship, from Barents duty, equipped formidably for cold latitudes, including Navy polar-weather clothing aboard in quantity, much else; not least, a ship’s company deeply experienced in battling frigid zones at the other end of the earth, on one of the coldest of seas. But the Antarctic: That was a quantum step up in frigid zones. The elements would be our foes. No problem otherwise of hostile welcome I could foresee. They would certainly be willing to share it with us if I knew anything about penguins. I remembered once standing in front of a large refrigerated cage containing a half dozen of them at the National Zoological Park in Washington—myself just back, in fact, from picking up my orders at BUPERS for the James, happy as a boy at this command; completely certified, all the insistent imprimaturs fulfilled, to command such a ship as I now went to: a qualified mariner; an authenticated noncrazy, nor likely to become one; a couple of hours to kill before the flight down to Mayport, knowing no one in the city, therefore visiting the animals, who didn’t require invitations, couldn’t refuse me. The only time I’d ever seen penguins. Feeding time came. The man entered with a bucket of fish. Instead of hassling him and climbing over each other to get to the fish, the penguins simply arranged themselves in a neat semicircle in front of him, as though taking their places at table, and there waited, each, patiently and quietly, until the man held a fish over its mouth, which then came open and took it, mouth then closing immediately. Presently giving a little yak of a noise which sounded like “Thank you.” No one shoving anybody else or trying to get another’s fish. Manners, politeness, decorum, consideration: all obviously important to them, greed vulgar. I felt you could count on their compassion, their willingness to share. Was there any way at all, if it should come to that, to deal with the frigid temperatures? With the food problems? None occurred. And yet the mind simply wouldn’t let go, give up, o
n any place that might have conferred on it that sublime distinction of Selmon’s. “It just might be the one place to remain free—now and forever.”
I stuck Antarctica in a corner of my mind.
11
Decision
“Shipmates,” I said, and told them at once, “you will remember that when I spoke to you in the Strait I told you of our hope that we would find a place in Africa, establish a temporary home, and keep trying to set up communications with America as to some place we might safely land there. Wait it out. I have to tell you now that Africa is not going to take us in.”
I had deliberately brought the ship to rest off Suez. We could just see its mouth in the distance. It was the fairest of days, so windless the ship swung not a degree on her anchor, the fulgent sunlight shining down from an unclouded sky of palest blue upon that intense and darker blue of the Mediterranean, stretching serenely to all horizons, the dying continent lying in the distance astern. A deep peace seemed to pervade the air, the universe, to embrace all in an almost ceremonial stillness. Only the ship broke the vast and plaintive solitude. All of light, of beauty of day; yet, thinking of what I was about to do, it was as though I stood on the shore of a somber and darkling sea. Uncertain as to how they would receive it; aware of the chasm on which I was poised, great peril close as could be to the surface. I looked down across the figures of the men and women of the ship, crowded body to body into the spaces below where I stood on the after missile launcher. They waited totally without sound or movement.
To one thing I had irrevocably made up my mind. It had now become necessary to assault them with the last cruel detail; both as to these new findings on that shore behind me and to those concerning home, the latter to some degree withheld, softened, the last time, in the Strait, when I had mounted the platform of the after missile launcher, as I had just now, and spoken to them. Then, though never dissimulating with them, I had tempered the brutality of giving them in explicit terms what had happened to their homes. Then I had spoken with compassion. Now in its stead a sense of ruthlessness lay upon me. This time they must not fail to understand. I had decided to have three officers address them, and in that order: Girard, to tell them about diminishing food supplies; Melville, the same as to fuel; and finally Selmon, as to conditions there. The first two making it clear to them that we simply had neither the fuel nor the food to do both things: to go home and to try to find a new home in the Pacific; Selmon to acquaint them beyond any possibility of misunderstanding with the evidence that there was little if anything to go home to. Girard and Melville had spoken. Now I said, “Mr. Selmon.”
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 45
