The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  I had told him beforehand to withhold nothing, either as to America or Africa; to tell them unsparingly, yes, unmercifully. He now proceeded to do so. He stepped up and stood beside me on the platform. He began to talk, the facts seeming the more pitiless for the steady, stolid recitation he made of them, as if being so incontrovertible in their stark deadliness, they needed no tricks of persuasion. First he disposed of Africa, as he had with me, in a few brisk sentences. Then he directed their attention to that other mainland, commenced to take them piece by piece through the last harrowing detail, offering not an ounce of propitiation. He told them that at the very best we might see on the beaches of Massachusetts and Maryland, of Virginia, Florida, people such as we had seen on the beaches of Amalfi, other beaches in our sweep of the European side of the Mediterranean. Did they remember them? Well, the only difference in those at home, those who might still be alive, would be that these would be considerably further gone in both physical and mental deterioration than those unforgotten figures we had viewed there. The portrayal came on relentlessly. Another difference: We had been able to spend an hour or so on the Mediterranean beaches. But now we could not do that on any of the beaches that he had mentioned. Not on Cape Cod or Rehoboth. Not Cape Hatteras or the Carolinas. Not Charleston, our home port. Not Georgia, not Jekyll Island, which many of the men knew from being not far away. From Jacksonville to Key West, not Florida. “Any man who spent five minutes on any of those beaches . . .” He paused and added, “Any woman—could never have children again,” he said as if he wanted a simple illustration to give them an idea, “even if he or she lived.” Then that sort of intellectual shrug that had become so much a part of the radiation officer. “But, of course, at the levels obtaining he would be dead in a week, a few weeks at the outside if he should be so unlucky as to have an exceptionally high tolerance.”

  He held back nothing. Having dealt with matters that concerned one of our two options as to course he turned to the other, as I had further instructed him to do. Our best bets for finding a habitable place lying somewhere among the islands of the Pacific, giving them in considerable detail why that was so—the vast spaces, the comparative absence of worthy targets, the surrounding protection of large waters, the pattern of the earth’s winds—all the reasons he and I, along with Thurlow and Bainbridge, had so meticulously explored that day in the chartroom, and the conclusions we had arrived at: All of this he set forth in the most calm and cogent terms, in a voice free of the slightest taint of emotion, concerned only with the evidentiary and the probable; radiating himself the composed air of one who knew absolutely what he was talking about; everything about him suggesting a man of incorruptible allegiance to a single purpose: Where does the truth lie? He carried immense conviction. His very manner, I think, making the reactions to the monstrousness of what they were being told come more slowly than they otherwise might have, but then coming the more certainly. As he spoke I watched their faces, impenetrable reflections passing across them like clouds as the dawning comprehension of what was being said to them made its inexorable, its ferocious inroads into all the fortifications of hope they had so assiduously erected. It was a masterly presentation.

  When he had finished a great silence seized ship’s company, so consummate that it seemed the very breathing of men could be heard. Selmon and I stood there waiting. Ship’s company waiting. No one, it seemed, wanting to break the adamant stillness—perhaps not yet having the voice to do so. After what Selmon had said, and this itself on top of the naked statistics set forth just previously by Girard and Melville as to matters of food and ship’s fuel, it seemed merciless what I had to do, like hitting a man when he was down. But it was for that very reason I knew I must proceed to do just that. To go after them while their defenses were breached, dealt such a blow. My part now to deliver the final one. I spoke into that silence.

  “Shipmates.”

  I looked across the waters, down the littoral of the continent, Suez—which we had reconnoitered—just beyond. I turned back.

  I looked down at their upturned, waiting faces, all attentive, with a certain fixity of gaze, in each case directed on their captain, all silent; faces each of which I knew so well, knew the man or woman behind each face; each to me so individually different, particularized, over that range of personalities, temperaments, idiosyncrasies, existent in seamen, in nature it had always seemed to me marked by a much wider spectrum of variability than in landsmen; each known by myself and to each other in that intimacy of relationship, in its intensity, its absolute dependence on one another, one and all, to be found nowhere else on earth, only a ship offering it—youthful faces; older faces; faces of men, of women, faces of those still little more than boys, girls: faces in which, thinning, the first reflections of reduced food rations were just beginning to be observable; all of these my own; every face raised toward mine.

  One does not harangue sailors. I spoke as any captain of the smallest sense speaks to them; directly, without frills, never in a raised voice. Sailors will hardly hear words said any other way, or if they do will dismiss them; sailors desire it straight.

  “Shipmates, a choice must be made. Between going home and setting course for the Pacific. That is absolute. We cannot go home, then if we find it impossible to live there, go to the Pacific. You have just heard: We simply haven’t the fuel or the food to do both. It has to be one or the other. We cannot have it both ways.”

  I waited a moment, unnecessarily perhaps giving each step of information time to be precisely absorbed, beyond the least doubt as to clarity.

  “As for home: All of you know that we have never stopped trying to reach it by every means of communication available to us. All of you by now are familiar with the Bosworth signal. What is it? As far as can be determined it is a recorded message being sent out at prescribed times by some sort of computer device, with no meaning whatsoever that anyone has been able to make out. We have given them our position, our identification, everything, asked them to explain. Nothing but that same incoherent message. But a few human beings in Bosworth, Missouri, and perhaps some other places of the country are no reason for us to go home. For one thing, it’s as certain as anything can be that we could not get across the beaches and inland to where they are, if they are, and remain uncontaminated ourselves. In fact, as Mr. Selmon has said, radiation readings so high, anyone making that journey would probably die long before reaching them, especially since he’d have to walk to wherever they are.”

  Waiting again for the same reason; as well, before delivering the hardest part of all.

  “But aside from these reasons, I must give you another for not going back: I don’t think you want to see it. If we found people alive, we could not take them aboard this ship. The sicknesses they have would soon in all likelihood contaminate the last one of us. Could you go through that?” I found myself speaking harshly. “Not picking them up? Suppose, let us say at Charleston—because so many of us have homes there, that is probably where we would make for first—suppose we found living people and some of you had relatives among them—could you stand not picking them up, abandoning them? Something else: Should you decide to join them, jump ship, go down with them, do you think they would thank you for adding that to their misery? The last thing they would want would be for you to have to make that choice.” I came down as hard as I knew how. “You would not want to see them, the way they are. But more important even than what you want is that if they, a few of them, are there and breathing, they would not want to see you. Do you understand that? You have heard Mr. Selmon. They would be like those people on the beaches of Amalfi. They would not want to see you. They would not want you to see them,’’ I repeated, the hardness for a moment overtaking me. I made my voice come softer. “You know what they would want? What they would say to you if they were here to say it? ‘For God’s sake, try to find a safe place for yourself.’ That is what they would say. ‘A place where you can live out your life, maybe do something, maybe start over . .
.’”

  I waited, reaching deep inside myself for strength to say it, feeling myself as much hearer as speaker of words, the sentence about to be pronounced being on myself as fully as on them—far more so, since if the course failed, I who had decided on it, who was promising so much, would be the chief criminal of all—words that began now to fall down over the men and seemed to drift out over the stilled and listening sea, she returning them like echoes of utter finality into our ears.

  “Shipmates, we cannot go home. That is my decision. Not if we have remaining in us any will to live, any desire to survive. I take it that the last hand of us does. The ship is our country now. It is the only country we have. We have no other choice than to go through Suez. We are greatly fortunate that it is open. Since we have not enough fuel to go around the long way, by the Cape of Good Hope. Those of you who believe in God should consider that an immense gift. Those of you who do not should believe that this is a very lucky ship. We should all believe that in any case. We will use our fuel to transit Suez, proceed through the Indian Ocean, and commence our search where our best chances lie—among the islands of the Pacific.”

  I was aware of their faces turned up to me with expressions of silence I would never forget, their eyes held in a fixity even now of not fully realized recognition of what they were being told; faces simply looking up at me, as the bearer of this news, in the unbroken stillness, the hush as of eternity under the bright sunlight now streaming down and setting the Mediterranean blue around us all dazzling; the world, life itself, the contemplations of men, seeming frozen in time, as though all chronometers had stopped and awaited a signal, a rewinding, to resume their ceaseless countdown; the unrevealed look of profound and hidden suffering, of anguish too great to allow its escape; knowing that no words could breach that grotesque and unutterable misery, the honor irremediable, and so best kept within; eyes looking up at me, seeming full of a great light, trying to grasp the ungraspable. And all the time themselves saying not a word. It was as though I was looking at men congenitally mute; unable to speak. I waited for that sense of triumph to come in me—instead came something else . . . Abruptly I felt an acute sense of inner disturbance. The breathless silence seemed to press down on me more than would have a chorus of protests, a cacophony of objections, eating into my resolve; the silence seeming brutal, as if it were their turn to be so for the brutality they had just been put through. One wished they would speak; at the same time, not wanting questions, one hoped contradictorily that they would not. The total silence from them held. In the beginning reassuring, it now of a sudden seemed infinitely menacing. It had been easy. Too easy. Something was not right. To the last hand ship’s company standing where they had stood through those agonizing minutes, or perched on ship’s fixtures—all motionless as in a sculpture. It seemed as though with a conscious effort to make clear and firm my voice that I gave the order.

  “Duty watch, make all preparations for getting underway. Mr. Thurlow.”

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Make us on a direct course through Suez.”

  “Just a moment, Captain.”

  Lieutenant Commander Chatham had stepped forward.

  “From whom, sir, does your authority now derive?”

  12

  The Parting

  The men making room for him, he stood directly below me.

  “If what you say is true, there is no government. There is no Navy that we know of. Who gives you the right to make these decisions? To decide the destinies of every one of us. By whose authority do you assume these powers for yourself?”

  I felt no anger, was not even surprised at feeling none. It was almost as though I knew that this would have to come sooner or later. Felt rather something like relief at the inevitable having at last arrived, that whatever now happened it would not henceforth be hanging forever over me. It was to be settled, once and for all, one way or the other; knowing but one thing, that the ship would never be the same.

  The words had fallen with a certain eloquence into that terrible quiescence, made so by a rational content even I could not deny: What indeed was now the source of my authority, my rule over these men? Words strengthened further by a case by no means without merit, indeed an entirely reasonable one—the Bosworth signal, the fact our own information was by nature far from absolute, urgent parts of it coming from what might be deemed suspect sources, dead Frenchman, recent-foe Russian; a case reasonable even to myself who had rejected it, bound to seem so to many hands, their thoughts unceasingly riveted to loved ones, wives, children, cruel and unacceptable that they not be allowed to go determine for themselves their fates. Before such forces my own weapons suddenly seemed shadowy, ephemeral, wholly vulnerable, quite capable of being swept away like sea foam before the wind, in a single sudden moment of upheaval by resolute men with so simple and so great a motivation as turning the ship around. Against the first, the challenge to my authority, I had remaining only my own will and an ancient law of the sea having to do with a captain’s unquestioned sovereignty off soundings; that and something others might rightly reduce to flagrant vanity and that even I viewed at times as but a prop to sustain me, a belief that only I could bring them through; against the second, my faith in Selmon’s determinations, that only death and horror waited at the end of the course this officer standing below me would choose for the ship.

  These assessments aside, all made by visceral rather than mental processes and in the time span of a blinker’s flash, I felt that great current of raw fear, in nature unlike any previously known, in myself, equally in all who waited, a fear one could almost smell and perhaps idiosyncratic to what had happened with such swiftness: the unspoken cognition sensed to a certainty in every hand that, hardly realizing it, we, seamen all, had stepped across that line which is the most awesome and forbidding known to the world of the sea, by nature also with results no man could predict, that might in that hair-trigger air that had claimed each one of us the moment Chatham had spoken turn on something done, or even thought, in an instant’s flare of emotion. Hence, nothing more insistent than to exercise the most precise control over my own, to present insofar as possible a calm demeanor, while I calculated whatever course might be available to me. To gain time the first urgency. For all these reasons surely with great intention speaking so, my voice came to my own ears almost weirdly softened, bell-like, even duly inquisitive, in the fervent stillness.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Chatham?”

  “Take the ship home, sir.”

  There was a movement, a surge among the men, at those words. Something felt rather than heard. That eerie, implacable silence: That was the scary part. The thought flashed through my mind like a warning buoy blinker set atop an underwater hazard on an unknown sea. Did he have sufficient men to take the ship? Followed instantly by an immense thankfulness for the decision I had made a while back to remove the small arms from this officer’s control: that armory securely locked now, myself in possession of the key. I simply stood waiting on the missile launcher platform, seeking clues as to their intention both in his own demeanor and that of the men, waiting to hear him out, voices carrying easily in the windless air, the stilled waters. For some reason I turned for a moment. Forward and high above me I could make out the ship’s commissioning pennant limp on the halyards, above it the national ensign, equally so. I looked now directly at him. There was a fire in his eyes. Other than that an air of the utmost composure, suggesting an officer whose mind as to course was irrefragably made up, who had entered with every consciousness of his acts on a purpose he had every aim of achieving. His voice, not a tremor in it, reached me in tones of unqualified resolve, and those of an officer now become a leader of men.

  “There is life back there. We know that more than ever now. The Bosworth signals told us that. Our people, our families are there. Some of them may still be alive. Some of that land—our country”—a sudden almost ferocity of expression, more normal speech then resumed—“is habitable. We want to g
o and find out these things. We intend to do so. We don’t believe you have the lawful power to deny us that right. The ship is not yours, sir. Not any longer. No legal authority exists to give you that kind of power over us.”

  I felt the time had come, whatever else I did, to fulfill a patent duty. I spoke quietly, carefully, nonetheless in a captain’s tone.

  “Speaking of lawful powers and of legal authority, I must warn you, Mr. Chatham, that you are in the process of making a mutiny.” I spoke over him to the men. “I give the same warning to whichever of you may be considering joining this officer in this affair. All of you are familiar with the punishments dealing with that activity as contained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They have been read to you from time to time as required.” I turned back to him. “Mr. Chatham, I suggest very strongly that you abandon whatever it is you have in mind.”

  “It is too late for that.” He spoke with his first touch of arrogance. “I say to you this final time, sir: We want this ship to come about and set a course for home.”

  Now, I thought. Nothing I could speak into that fast-ascending tension was going to be without risk. But the barest opening had been presented me, in the form of a single word. Now. Move into it now.