“Captain?”
“Yes, Mr. Selmon.”
“The clouds, sir. The rain.”
The language seemed idiotic. I knew Selmon was not.
“Yes, what about them?”
“I’ve been taking readings from the rainfall. It’s low-grade radioactive, sir.”
I looked at him steadily; feeling no great surprise; deep inside me, prepared for it.
“Those are nuclear clouds, sir.” He waited a moment, as if figuratively looking at a calendar. I had never known a man with a more systematic mind. “I’d say they’re arriving just about on schedule.”
It was almost as if he would have been disappointed had he made an error in his timetable.
* * *
We had learned long since: The winds were now become the true rulers of the universe. Indeed they had for some time, almost from the first, been dictating our actual course. They were the drivers of the high black mantles; of their progeny now descending on us. These had only been awaiting the whims of the winds. Now they came, prevailingly variant tenths of west, now due, now W. by N.W., now N.W. by W., not strong, Beauforts 2 and 3 usually, occasionally freshening to 5. They came bearing gifts. It was as if those singular clouds were pursuing us, that of course an illusion created by the fact that we were a solitary ship on the seas. As we proceeded S. by S.E., through the close waters, unavoidably on the short fuel-conserving course we were following being more and more surrounded by land, the skies fluctuated as to cloud cover. On some days more, some less, but whichever, all of them of that darker hue which to a mariner had always forecast rains. Only no rains fell. More significantly, this overcast becoming darker and by the day, seeming also to hover lower in the skies. And finally this happened: Even with no rain to parachute them down on the ship, Selmon began to pick up patches falling on her, minute at first, but not so much so as not to disclose to his instruments that they were radioactive. Now he constantly roamed the ship looking for them, obsessively. Increasingly, he had to look less diligently. Increasingly, he found not just patches but large swaths fastening themselves to ship’s surfaces; to weather decks, to stanchions, to boats, to the five-inch gun, the Phalanx, the missile launchers. The clouds dropping sprinkles of fallout, precipitations not of raindrops, but of dust and soot. And steadily their radioactive content rose.
Then an observable change: Very thin hazes, of a mistlike aspect at first, had begun to form like a delicate membrane across the sun itself, sometimes for an hour or two, then for a half day or so before full sunlight returned. Each renewal longer and of a more umbrageous character, constituting finally a kind of penumbra, rather like a species of partial eclipse. We found ourselves keeping our running lights on longer as day approached, turning them on sooner as night came on. Then another thing happened. The thermometer began to record drops, also slight initially, never precipitous, still to levels not to be expected in these waters. Thurlow, our navigation and meteorological officer, began tentatively to force this to my attention. Then one morning I came on deck to find a palpable chill in the air, along with a sun more obscured than previously by what could only be described as a kind of luminous dust. I had a look at the bridge thermometer. It read 48° F. In what appeared an obvious companion to the cover of contaminated cloud, the drop in temperature continued over the following days, slowly but on a steady downcurve. I had Thurlow check tables in our nautical and meteorology library. No such lows had ever been recorded in these latitudes. We continued on course.
The sun could still be seen or at least where it was, more clearly at times than at others. One day looking up I could observe that at the moment it hung in its dusky cloak at the zenith. A twilight gloom prevailed now at noonday. A strange and absolute stillness seemed to weigh down on us, on the ship, as if the stealthy luminous dust had brought with it not just its tenebrous shield but this bodeful and ominous soundlessness as well, broken only by the mildest of winds bearing N. by N.W. and whispering intermittently across us in mournful notes. The substance reached down now to a point not far above the ship’s masts, stopping short of the waters which stretched in a glassy motionless repose, mute like all else, to all horizons, these vertically foreshortened only by the lurking nigrescent shroud crouched above them. Stopping there, hanging, like an opaque window shade drawn to a precise level and no further, as if, having established a domain of obscuration vast and unchallenged over the heavens, it yet hesitated to take on the great sea itself.
At first, as we proceeded toward the Java Sea, the overcast still allowed leaks of sunlight through holes in the clouds. Soon, however, these were sealed and the overcast became solid. We had lost the sun. This was followed by a heavy, blackish layer of fog and haze consisting of roiling, turbid vapors that enshrouded the waters and rolled in swarthy, infinitely languid waves over the ship, obscuring even the lookouts for periods of time, as the ship made its creepingly slow encroachment into the noiseless veil, speed reduced to eight knots. Now at noonday one looked up and could barely see the gleam of the masthead light. I was much aware of a possible new danger of a high order, its first evidence appearing one morning when a huge hulk loomed up in the murk, the lookout Barker in the bow reporting on the sound-powered phone, “Ship dead ahead!” the officer of the deck Thurlow’s instant “Hard right rudder,” Porterfield’s instant execution in putting the wheel over. Through the swirling vapors we could see our port side slide by this monster—we could almost have reached out and touched her—a tanker of over a thousand feet she must have been. She was but the first. I was not too surprised, aware of the fact that we were moving through what had been the most traveled East-West sea-lanes in the world. I left standing orders for the ship to keep slowed down to a bare steerageway and ringed the ship with lookouts, our visibility on occasion reduced to not much more than a ship’s length even with our powerful searchlight aimed into the murk; myself keeping during this period to my chair on the starboard side of the bridge. I also further minutely instructed Porterfield and the other helmsmen. “You men. Steer like you never steered. Don’t wait for the command. Steer by seaman’s eye. If you see something, bring her over hard.” And finally I set a watch on the open bridge, Bixby and other signalmen ringing the church-sized ship’s bell, in a counterpoint with the foghorn, the two great alternating sounds blaring and tolling out spectrally over the ship and into the black haze entombing her. Porterfield during this stretch standing longer watches than anyone, saving us from collision more than once, having almost to be pulled away from the wheel when I could see his own exhaustion overtaking him. Still I was surprised at the numbers of the ships. Hulks of ships; every type of ship, it seemed, known to the seas; merchant vessels mostly, the occasional man-of-war, a couple of times a passenger liner. All looming suddenly, mute, darkened, out of the murk, they seemed to constitute some great ghostly fleet, of all flags, drifting rudderlessly as the waters took them. Far from any desire to approach them, much less board them, we were concentrating absolutely in avoiding them, not to ram them.
The sooty darkness becoming ever more impenetrable, the thermometer continued its steady fall. Thurlow’s research showed 62° F. as the lowest recorded reading on present latitude. One day around noon I came on the bridge, turned the flashlight on the thermometer, and saw a reading of 27° F. A rain began to fall out of that opaque blackness. It seemed to pelt soot and dirt against the ship; thick, penetrating rain. Flashing the strong light around, I could see the raindrops seeming to freeze solid the moment they touched the ship, covering everything, gun mounts, even lifelines, and creating a freezing slush on the weather decks. I looked up and saw icing beginning to attach itself to the mast and top hamper. I turned and sighted aft, directing the light there. Thin stalactites hung from the deck gear and antennas. The ship was gradually being wrapped in a skin of ice. We were three degrees below the equator.
Fortunately the cold was the least of our worries in the practical sense. One circumstance of immeasurable good fortune came to assist us. We
were a cold-weather ship, rigged for some of the most frigid waters earth held, the Barents; the ship herself fitted with sophisticated deicing devices, which we now commenced to use, and with the best cold-weather clothing the Navy had been able to devise. The latter we had sometime back turned to, Girard’s supply department breaking out the Arctic gear. It was a godsend. Most of all, a ship’s company with much experience on deep-temperature seas; undisturbed by cold, by icing, knowing how to cope with them. Nor was there great surprise at this development. Again Selmon had prepared us. Sometimes I was alternately alarmed and irritated at the stolid, almost insouciant manner in which he had come to accept these new manifestations as being now in the normal state of affairs.
And so, grotesque figures in our Arctics, we entered the equatorial waters of the Java Sea.
Something far more ominous than the cold came to attack us. This was Selmon’s constant readings and the nature of their curve. For it was not long before they registered that the weather decks were unsafe for any period of time. Soon—by that time we were exactly, deliberately so, mid-sea between Jakarta on our starboard and Borneo on our port—they reached a level where it was dangerous to be topside at all.
* * *
Now, in brute force, that terrible substance began to lay siege to the ship herself. I instituted extreme measures. I sealed the ship and her personnel. All lookouts, all weather deck stations whatever stood down; all personnel kept below decks at all times, save only for the essential pilot house watch. Most fortunate of all, the Nathan James, considering the nature of her mission, had been constructed with just this possibility in mind; that is to say, that her fiercest enemy might turn out to be not the usual ones that threaten destroyers—submarines, mines, aircraft, other surface vessels armed with surface-to-surface missiles—but that other hostile force which was now attacking us. An overpressure system for protection against the ingress of CBR (chemical-biological-radiological) contamination; all incoming air filtered, more reliance placed on recirculating air inside the ship; internal air pressure maintained at a higher level than external pressure: the Nathan James class indeed being the first ships to have the complete system built in. Combined with the use of sealants which by deep research and experimentation had been brought to an extraordinary level of efficacy, these measures made the ship’s interiors as impervious to outside contamination as is a submerged submarine to seawater; men could live below decks with complete safety so long as they did not venture onto the weather decks; a partial exception being the pilot house watch, working in a space where glass “windshields” were essential to the conning of the ship. But even in the pilot house, using the same sealants, along with other protectants such as triple-paning, the builders were able to achieve a very high degree of impermeability to radiation, if not quite the perfect protection possible below. In addition I made bridge watches as small as consistent with the ship’s safety, also halving the length even of these to two hours in order to limit exposure; all bridge hands issued gas masks; all subject to a dosimeter reading from Selmon immediately on coming off watch; then to bathe immediately. They were not the only ones for this latter precaution. The ship herself we washed down frequently; the ship immersed in high fountains of water from the special device created also for ships of our original mission; the ship quite literally having herself a bath, the strong streams of water reaching everywhere topside meant to carry away all foreign material; the effectiveness of the system much diminished due to the contamination of the sea, nevertheless it might help marginally.
Thus a strange and sealed ship, no hands in view except the few in the pilot house necessary to navigate the ship, day after day, night after night—the two barely distinguishable—we proceeded ghostlike through the miasmal gloom. By now no one needed to be persuaded as to the perils of radiation contamination, the nature of its affliction. Those poor souls on the beaches of Amalfi, those animals in the Kenya bush, had been our teachers. In the closed pilot house I would sometimes glance at Selmon standing at his repeater, which afforded readings of the outside; looking steadfastly at it. The only illumination that of it and the shining ovals of light cast by the binnacle, the engine-order telegraph, the gyrocompass. All of us become considerably thinner from reduced rations, there was something especially skeletal and disembodied about his naturally slight figure in that gloom. He was going virtually without sleep. Standing there now like some haggard hierophant before the altar, gazing reverentially into his hallowed reliquary; preparing, as some intermediary before a higher power, to cast from it his sacerdotal pronouncements, our sole chart and compass.
Sometimes then, myself, checking the gyrocompass, turning savagely, stepping out for the briefest look into the stillness, behind me the pilot house doors rolling shut on silent runners, and peering through the substance as though it might somehow be clearing. Standing on the bridge wing in the bone-chilling air, now to zero levels here five degrees south of the Equator, peering through the caliginous pall. The substance had a taste to it, there was something foul and corrosive in its breath—gritty, granular, a fetid, dirty thing, redolent with the taint of virulence, of death. Choking, stifling: One wanted terribly to cough but held back, fearing that if one started one would fall into uncontrollable spasms never to stop; the murky turmoil swirling back across the ship and around her mainmast, the swirls faintly illuminated by the red and green running lights shining from the ends of the bridge wings. Nothing visible. No sea, no sky, no horizon. It was as if we were back in the mists of time. We moved in an etheric stillness, a silence broken only by the soft swish of the slowed ship slicing through the waters into the tumult of vapors, which with instant avarice closed around us and held the ship in its embrace of feral, choking blackness, seeming a solid obstacle in her path so that the ship appeared to have to shove her way through it. It was as if we were approaching Hades’ shores, had entered and were navigating the Styx itself, now and then hearing the deep moan of the wind from unseen skies above us, whispering through the halyards like laments from the dead.
No, for the hands—the great majority of ship’s company—kept below decks, risks of a physical character which presented themselves during this long part of our passage while present were less of a threat than those of another kind. That greater risk came from a supernumerary who had boarded the Nathan James and who went by many names, came in many spectres, some of which were derangement, mental disorder, loss of reason, insanity.
* * *
I myself brought them regular reports from topside; had to tell them over and over again, their hopeful faces looking up at me, that there was no change, no lifting of that vicious gloom. Bear in mind that these were men accustomed to working in the pure ocean air. Now cooped up, sealed below decks, not permitted to venture topside. One became aware of a strain which seemed to draw our minds ever tighter as the days—all nights really—went on, the tension becoming something very like a chronic physical pain. Feeling, each of us, the mass of that unseen awful substance sitting down on the ship. I sensed some sinister emotion creeping into them; a feeling that we might never come out of it; that they were doomed forever in perpetual night to this existence, ending in—what? Men, even men of proven fortitude, have limits. It seemed an immense mystery. Despite all of Selmon’s explications, making it clear to any rational mind, we could never fully understand it. Oh, yes, intellect could understand it; it was clear enough. Heart could not. Daily, the strain became more visible in some . . . the mess deck gradually becoming a little hell of its own. We lost any clear idea of time, the night-day synonymy contributing to this. Sometimes the screeching of the wind heard through our steel walls sounding like a threnody, seeming the sounds and sighs of evil conjurations creeping in upon us like some malevolence aimed only and explicitly at us—who else could they be after? We seemed at times like men being driven slowly, inexorably, to sanity’s edge by this hideous force fastened upon us, in its unspeakable cruelty sucking our strength, our spirit, our very life’s blood—
most of all, our hope.
Of course, I made frequent short talks to them; not prolonged things; sailors take inspiration from deeds, from comportment, more than from words; the best thing I could do for them was to suppress my own inner terrors, to present insofar as within my powers a steady countenance. I spoke honestly; maybe they gave me credit for that. Each time I descended from the bridge and that black world above into as dark a world—that other tense and insulated mental and emotional twilight world where they sat huddled, waiting—each time I came off that ladder, their faces looking up at me, the first times with hope, this gradually flickering out to become a kind of deadness of eyes as they awaited the same unchanging word from me . . . I could only report to them invariably that there was as yet no breach in conditions above. At first “everybody shall be safe” little speeches; knowing sailors too well to do too much of this; after a while giving up such phrases entirely, since they could not come from my true heart, something they would instantly know. Never presenting to them a face of despair—that equally not mirroring my feelings, not yet—but simply making my reports, giving them the straight dope. Their only word from the outside, these accounts, in that cavern they were as blind men; the only thing keeping men in that prison, their knowledge that topside lay death; quick death. Selmon’s sensor readings: figures of which I made certain we kept them meticulously informed; by now every hand aboard having intimate knowledge as to rad tolerances, a kind of specialty added on to whatever each sailor’s principal specialty happened to be.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 51
