The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  As I was saying: On the whole the women to every outward appearance were calmer during our ordeal, not entirely free of the extremes of emotional reaction which now and then gripped some of the men, but, it appeared to me, more able to contain it, one or two exceptions. Observing this, I went so far, familiar with the widely held psychiatric idea that sexual accommodation often takes care of the problem of emotional disorder, its absence frequently causing it, as to have the horrible thought of suspecting them of solving the problem in their own way, in their sealed quarters which even I could not enter at will. I mention this only to illustrate how far my own mind at times deviated from any true course, if only briefly, quickly telling myself, as in this instance, that this was nonsense of the worst sort and of which I should be ashamed—and was—even to let the notion reach my mind; dangerous nonsense at that. Still, going so far in my fancy as actually to consider asking Girard about it. I must have been for that second almost literally out of my mind. As I say, all of us, in various ways, went a little mad. This was mine. Anyhow, the shock of recognition that I had even had such a thought brought me to my senses, informed me that the problem here was not whatever the women might be doing but my own chimeras. Thereafter, alert for any more of these that might come at me, ready, lacking clear evidence, to strike them down; probably nothing but my own sense of a ship’s captain’s mortal allegiance in such circumstances seeing myself through.

  Parenthetically, the following: It was sometime during this passage through the dark and the cold that what would have seemed crushing, removing some last fine thread of hope, was made known to us—made known to me alone, I should say, and to Girard and Thurlow, no one else in ship’s company knowing of the arrangement with the submarine captain, a matter for which I now felt inexpressibly grateful. We had managed a couple of exchanges, ourselves telling him we were proceeding through heavy contamination, his reply far more cheerful—his submergence protecting him, how I now envied him and his ship that capability—informing us that, reconnoitering the Russian coastline, following the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk through the Kara and Laptev seas, he was negotiating the East Siberian Sea, with no difficulty heading toward destination; my heart had lifted. Then sometime back—losing all identification of time, I cannot pin down the precise date—we had lost contact with Pushkin. Repeated efforts to raise her, both at the agreed times of her surfacing for that express purpose, and at other times as well: Nothing came back from her. She had simply vanished. At first attempting with myself the spurious consolation that it was all a transmission difficulty having to do with the elements we were passing through, then reminding myself mercilessly that this, of course, had nothing to do with it, I faced up to the probability that she had been lost at sea—on such a perilous voyage, in such times as these, the number of ways that could happen was without limitation—and that therefore what little nuclear fuel we possessed, with its slim hope of holding out until we found something habitable, was all we would ever have; we would make it on that or not make it at all. Crushing, I said, the realization that that hope, of the Russian’s bringing us a fresh supply, had been so abruptly obliterated. Remembering a final time her last message, that she would reach Karsavina the following day, not naming that place, but the excitement, exuberance, the triumph, coming through: “Great hopes for Turgenev.” Then, as a conscious act, I brutally expunged Pushkin, her captain and her crew and her mission, from my mind as if they had never been. I turned inward, back to my own ship, my own ship’s company.

  Back to my own: Nothing is more remarkable than man’s capacity for survival. Yet I thought the tension in the mess deck, the prison sentence stretching out, no end in sight, was approaching some breaking point, some explosion; the very real question of how much longer the men could take it, building as seas build under high winds and low pressure. Then these problems became as nothing, as a common cold, before evolvements infinitely more perilous to us, to the ship.

  We never did anything like taking a muster. Frankly, the idea never occurred to me. If now and then the thought touched my mind that I had not seen a particular man for a couple days or so, the obvious answer was that he had gone off to be by himself, perhaps to cloak his manifestations from his shipmates, perhaps feeling that he could best work through them alone. There are innumerable places on a ship where a man might with ease accomplish this concealment. Storage lockers, sail lockers, steering-gear room, a couple score other sites. I scarcely knew it at the time in the turmoil of all that was going on, vaguely aware from time to time that this face was missing, that one, not certain but what its owner had gone to hide out in his misery in some remote part of the ship. Then one day the idea began very slowly to penetrate my consciousness—perhaps itself deadened somewhat by exhaustion—that there appeared to be what I might term an accumulation of absences; a certain number of men not having been seen by me for a number of days. Horror has its own way of announcing itself; not infrequently in a sudden illumination, an empiercement of the mental process. I knew in one instantaneous moment. Men were slipping overboard. A ship has many exits into the seas through which she moves, a man can go over the side quite easily, not even be missed for a while, particularly in the circumstances then obtaining. I immediately took a muster and discovered we had lost fifteen hands. Worst of all, three of them were women. I got the doc, the Jesuit, Girard in my cabin, door closed. Feeling myself going swiftly back and forth over some terrible dissonance of emotions that ranged from rage to desolation, stopping it by every exercise of will I had remaining from then slipping over the edge into that panic which, one knew as one knew nothing else, would take us all with it; perhaps these same elements at work in the others, I could not tell, their own forces of inner suppression surely equally applied. The conversation was hesitant in the extreme. It was as though we were afraid of words, of trying to spell it out, probe it, fathom it, as if dealing with some dark mystery which if investigated too far would explode in our faces. The most frightening intimation we had as to at least part of what was in process was contained in a note left where the Jesuit would find it by Bellows, a missile technician, one of those who had gone over; the Jesuit going on to suggest why the contents of the note indicated it was not an isolated case, that at least some of the crew were deliberately getting through some hatch or another to come to the weather decks, to stand by intention in that lethal atmosphere, deliberately contaminating themselves—some, it was possible, doing this more than once, then finally simply going over into the waiting sea. We all sat for a bit in a kind of horrified stupefaction at the very hideousness of it. The Jesuit continued.

  “I don’t think I betray vows, not naming names, to say—yes, in confession”—he had never before made reference to that personal resource—“some of them—it’s very difficult to put it, they didn’t put it any too explicitly themselves, due to, well . . . guilt. Catching up with them. That burden having become too great for them. Doing a lot of reading of the Bible, most of them. Some . . . in some of them . . . a fair probability I’d say . . . an act of penance . . . atonement . . . seeking thereby some kind of redemption . . . Of course, I had no idea they would carry it that far . . . until Bellows’ note . . . its allusion to that reason . . . after the fact . . .”

  “Atonement!” I exploded the word; the concept itself seeming to unleash a kind of fury in me; perhaps near some sort of edge myself. “We’ve got enough to deal with without having to deal with atonement. For Christ’s sake, Father.”

  A soft smile. “Captain, you have just pronounced almost the very words I responded with when they were made by hands. Except the last ones,” he said gently.

  “Perhaps they’re reading the Bible too much,” I said.

  “Shall I forbid them to do so, Captain?”

  “All right, Doc.”

  He had sat there like an undernourished Buddha. He hated religion and everything about it; quietly thought it was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon man; a close second, and what he consider
ed its first cousin, a subdivision of his own profession, the whole field of psychiatry-psychoanalysis-psychology. He and the Jesuit were quite good friends.

  “Well, I’m a doctor,” he said. “Or try to be. I can’t speak to the mumbo jumbo. I’d say they just arrived at the limits of their endurance. We all have one.”

  “The hell we do, Doc.”

  I waited, looking coldly around that circle. The doc shrugged. He was not being insubordinate. He simply knew that he, like the Jesuit, had a fairly long leash, by his captain’s preference; a leash, however, not without limitations.

  “Fact is, I don’t think there’s any way of knowing.” He spoke dryly. “I take it everyone here is aware that, medically speaking, we’re sailing in uncharted waters. What we do know compared with what we don’t is like a thimble of sand to the beach. What it’ll do to people.”

  “Can you speak some English, Doc?” I said.

  “I’ll try, Skipper.” He took a breath. “Maybe something went wrong with their—well, mechanism. Something that may be happening just to them. Most things that happen to human beings happen to them varyingly—different tolerances, all of that. The other possibility exists, of course: Something that may be happening to all of us. And if it does, that it might take entirely different forms than—jumping ship.”

  We all simply stared at him. No one spoke. Wondering, myself, surely the others as well, who could deal with such forces? I thought I had one small idea at least, pitiful as it might seem against them. I turned to the Jesuit, in my voice something like supplication.

  “Father, I’m going to ask you to break a sacred vow. Could you give us the names of those who have told you, or in future tell you, anything to suggest they are thinking of going over the side—whether for reasons of ‘guilt’ or any other reason? So we can at least keep an eye on them?”

  He found at once the fallacy in the proposal.

  “Aside from breaking my sacred vows, as you say, I don’t know how long it would work. These are canny men. Sooner or later they’d find out what I’m doing and the confession box would dry up.”

  I felt a captain’s impatience with this, with any verbiage that would get in the way of action, of doing something; tried to suppress it; hearing my voice still coming with a kind of feverish urgency.

  “During that ‘later,’” I said, “maybe we’ll have talked some out of going over. Don’t you think the Lord will permit an exception to your regulations under the circumstances?” I could not keep it back. “Or do you think He has lost all interest in saving lives?”

  Something snapped in me. Maybe Girard’s presence the strong reminder; I had a sense of her simply staring at me, in a combination—could I have imagined this?—of personal concern for myself and a hard and unyielding admiration of what I was about. I turned savagely on the Jesuit as if forcing some ruthless catechism upon him.

  “You call yourself a priest. Do you realize that of those fifteen, three of them were women? And do you realize how few women we’re getting down to? And do you realize what that means?”

  A shock seemed to fill the cabin. Then, voice unraised, a certain tone:

  “You’re right, of course. Under the circumstances there isn’t time to ask Him about those exceptions to my vows. I’ll do it on my own. Up the line if He asks, I’ll tell Him I couldn’t get through to Him, there was a busy signal. Probably the case anyhow these days.”

  He was a Jesuit.

  I was about to dismiss them.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, Miss Girard.”

  She had a baffled look; spoke slowly, with great deliberation.

  “Those three women. Salinas, Kramer, Stoughton, I don’t understand it. Of course, they were affected like all of us . . . but that they would do that: I still can’t believe it. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  I looked at her for a moment, started to pursue it, ask a question, decided not.

  “That’s it for now. Miss Girard, gentlemen.”

  Almost simultaneously, something totally unexpected, trusting as we did in the ship’s inbuilt protective devices.

  We had passed into the Flores Sea. One day I stepped once again from the pilot house out into that terrible murk, the atmosphere like a wall, opaque, impenetrable; the object of these occasional exercises to determine if I could see any suggestion of its lifting. How I longed to see a single star! Purpose also being to isolate myself with my thoughts, to try desperately to come up with some way through, anything. The firmament stood merciless, heartless, invisible: nothing, only the onslaught of those same vile vapors, that throbbing shroud. Suddenly out of it a snow began to fall. The thermometer—I had just checked it by flashlight—stood at twelve degrees above zero Fahrenheit; we were off a place called Diji, eight degrees below the equator. Sensing something strange, I held my hand out, held it out for a minute or so until enough of the snow had gathered in it; I turned my flashlight on that flattened palm. The snow was black. I felt like weeping. Instead I stood awhile under it in the absolute darkness, the snow thickening, hearing the faint wail of the wind like a dirge. With a vicious movement I wiped the horrible stuff away on my Arctics. I stepped back inside the pilot house, caught for a moment in a spasmatic coughing, from that squalid substance and from some unspeakable rage. I found Selmon staring straight at me; something almost hostile in his look.

  “You shouldn’t stay out that long,” he said, quite sharply considering that he was speaking to his captain.

  There was something so unnatural in the rebuke that, coming closer and seeing his hollowed face in the light of the repeater, pale as the complexion of a ghost, his eyes seeming to glisten wildly, I knew with a shock that alarm had at last reached that phlegmatic personality; a kind of desperation I had never seen there seeming to ooze out of him; something of a dark terror on it; knowing the man, registering an instant fear in myself.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Captain, the bridge watch, all of them . . .” His voice, always steady, seemed to tremble a little in its hoarseness, as if some ravaging chill had seized him, or the substance itself had done so, and as if this itself was evidence for the dread thing he was saying. “Every hand standing watch here . . .” I became aware in a kind of horror that the present watchstanders were watching us intently, listening, they themselves, outlandish in their Arctics and gas masks, seeming bedazed with unspeakable fatigue, or with something else too terrible to think of . . . “These readings . . .” He looked down at his repeater, its dim glow reaching up just enough to reveal his specterlike face. “They are approaching unacceptable levels. Sir.”

  * * *

  They sat assembled in my cabin. Selmon, the doc, Thurlow, Melville, Girard.

  “Captain, we have to get out of this,” the doc said. “Those men going overboard . . .”

  “We can forget them,” Selmon said. He spoke brutally, in his voice a direct, relentless urgency I had never heard from him. “Let’s talk about those still aboard. The men are accumulating too much of it.”

  He was speaking of the bridge watch. But that had been rotated among men able to stand any of its positions.

  “We’re talking about forty-five men,” Thurlow said. “And we’re talking about the only men who know how to navigate and conn this ship. Watch officers, quartermasters, helmsmen, lee helmsmen. One-fourth of ship’s company.”

  “How much farther on present course, Mr. Melville?” I had alerted him to make calculations. He had his clipboard; he looked at it; spoke with his usual precision, his impervious courtliness.

  “Three thousand one hundred miles, sir.”

  “Mr. Selmon?”

  “The readings have been going up. Slowly, but steadily. We expected that. But the rate of the upcurve has increased—with it, the readings on all bridge watchstanders.”

  “Doc?”

  “We’ve had some mild cases of illness, as you know, sir. All temporary. Whether they were due in fact to minor, passing radiation sickness or to someth
ing else, there’s no way of telling. Everyone of them being a bridge watchstander suggests something. Effects becoming somewhat more severe. I wouldn’t like to see any worse cases of it.”

  Selmon: “Three thousand more miles of it: On present course we’ll be passing near large land masses, all we’ve met the most contaminated spaces of all. If that rate continues . . . We don’t know enough about it. What men can absorb. Not that finely defined. But we know this: we’ll soon be into levels . . . lives will be at risk . . . which ones we can’t tell. Different tolerances as we also know. There’s no way of telling—take Porterfield’s tolerance—as opposed to Meyer’s . . .” she had been standing lee-helm watches. “And I do know this. We’re approaching margins we haven’t seen before. Three thousand more miles through this . . .” he said again. Stopped, spoke in his old quiet formality. “High risk, sir. At least for all watchstanders; for forty-five hands.” His voice dropped to an utter evenness, calm, this itself sending a chill through the cabin: “Everybody else below decks should make it.”