The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  The coldness of that, from the least of alarmists: He did not mention that the forty-five included himself; included among others present Thurlow; myself. Doc and Melville, Girard, kept below, not at risk.

  “The other course, Mr. Melville?”

  “I’ve done the rough calculations, sir. It’ll take a month, thereabouts, off our fuel supply.”

  “And off our food supplies as well,” Girard said.

  The course through the Timor and Arafura seas and then along the northern coast of Australia had been originally chosen, as mentioned, as being the shortest one into the Pacific, along with the attraction of taking us through normally inhabited areas where we might find uncontaminated lands and human beings who would take us in. The Australians, particularly, I had kept thinking of. Any hope as to the latter objective having diminished considerably in the light of recent explorations only seemed to increase the prudence of the first and holding to it, its intent being to use the minimum of fuel in order to have as much as possible remaining to search our most promising prospects for habitability. Even going the short route, Melville had calculated that, arriving at our destination, we would have but two months remaining for that purpose. This we had viewed as an irreducible minimum. Now the other course, the one to take us out of the radioactivity threat, would halve that to one; diminish our search period desperately; to the peril point. Forty-five men. It was a terrible choice to have to make. To lose the fuel that might enable us to find a home; to arrive at that home with possibly so many of the crew lost, gone. A fourth of ship’s company. And the very men, as Thurlow had pointed out, who navigated the ship. But not just that. Myself. Selmon. Thurlow, who would normally succeed me. Who would succeed Thurlow? Who could replace Selmon? For that matter, myself. So great had my vanity become, I was not confident that any other could bring them through. I found myself reaching into the darkest depths.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll have to take our chances with the fuel.”

  * * *

  At daybreak—one still in the gloom—Thurlow, Selmon, Melville and I stood by the chart table and plotted the new course. Taking the first breach in the Lesser Sunda Islands, our first chance to remove ourselves from these land-choked waters, we executed it by passing through the Selat Alor into the Indian Ocean. I opened us up, the overcast pursuing us for a period of slightly over twenty-four fours. Selmon took his new readings; very low, they allowed the men who had been imprisoned below decks to be released, brought topside, as men released from a dungeon. Then one morning we came on deck, all of ship’s company—only the engineroom watch below—and stood watching the huge vermilion ball rise majestically from waters of brilliant blue; as of a phenomenon we had never seen before; stood gazing in wonder, in a great hush, as it began its ancient transit across clear and windless skies of a softer azure; forgotten men brought here by an act of deliverance; sailors brought back to their own sure home, into the great security of the sea, the waters of salvation.

  4

  Exile

  Moving out into the Indian Ocean across the Wharton Basin, as far as could be from any land, we stood S. by S.W., proceeding across Broken Ridge straight down the hundredth longitude. Sailors accustomed at times to be as indifferent to the sea as a landsman might be of his backyard, the great ocean seemed now to us to be invested with magic properties. We were like men seeing for the first time the great beauty of the planet, what a lovely place earth was. Emerging from the long darkness and cold, released most of all out of that foul and pestilential air we had breathed so long into the full and magnanimous sunshine, the pure ocean air, we were men reprieved. We had come home, our natural home; and turned to the restorative sea for healing. How fortunate were we to be sailors! Standing, as sailors seldom do, simply gazing across the great blue blaze of it, the immense cleanness of the open sea we had almost forgotten, stretching in an undefiled plain to all horizons: What pure joy for a seaman to see a horizon! Looking up into that other azure, at that softly delicate sky of low latitudes. Everywhere on the weather decks, men and women who had seen neither sun nor stars for weeks basked with voluptuous torpor in the first, transcendent days, under the blessed rays corpse-colored bodies, shed of their Barents Arctics, beginning to take on tans, remaining thin, on short rations, nonetheless looking infinitely better to one another—we could hardly have looked worse; at night, bewitched by the second, reluctant to go below where prison had been, many brought mattresses topside to sleep under the great constellations, the stars, so long gone into hiding, now in their splendor seeming to hang low in the sky, seeming purposively, with intent to render succor, to ring the ship in radiant comfort, a tiara of them perched atop the ship’s mainmast. In the wonder of the cloudless skies, the caressing westerlies we soon encountered, familiar Venus sitting on the dark edge of the horizon, visible now to them not only many additional stars known to sailors, but others most of the crew had never set eyes on, stars, constellations, which held court only in southern climes: the great Southern Cross, Phoenix, Carina, Musca, bright Canopus.

  As sailors, we gloried in this world of a new sea, in differences unknown to those who had never taken ship below the planet’s great dividing line, the equatorial barrier. Not just unviewed constellations but everything about it seemed changed: stars coursing around the Pole clockwise, the opposite to their northern-latitudes habits; the very winds blowing counterclockwise instead of clockwise as on north parallels. Thurlow and others knowing, of course, that the phenomena stayed the same, merely the observer’s point of view changing; an example, the moon looking upside down, the moon’s north pole being always north, but seen from the Northern Hemisphere it being at the moon’s top while from the Southern Hemisphere being at the bottom. The navigator took delight in explaining these simple matters to those of ship’s company unfamiliar with them. Most of all it was the sheer exhilaration, the ineffable bliss, of breathing uncontaminated air, and the purest air earth holds—that of the open sea. One found oneself consciously taking deep breaths of it. To save every possible drop of fuel, I cut our forward speed to eight knots, making us seem barely to move through the stilled seas parting ever so gently for the ship.

  Sometimes, proceeding through that sweet ocean vastness, standing on the bridge wing and looking aft down the length of the ship at men on watch going about their work, men off watch lying somnolently in the sun, my thoughts stood relaxed, a contentment, something like exultation in me observing them. I had always, perhaps from living among sailors nearly all my life, had a higher opinion than some of the capacity of men as to courage, as to kindness, as to selflessness so profound as to be scarcely explicable. Looking down at them now, these opinions could not have been but greatly fortified. How well they had held up! In a sense they had never been more tested, either of these two groups, and which had been more so it would have been difficult for me to say. The pilot house watch, standing brutal watch shifts, navigating the ship through that awful murk, knowing, each man, each woman, that as they did so they were steadily absorbing into their bodies amounts of radiation, never knowing when its accumulation might reach a point to bring on a terrible sickness, or worse; never flinching from their duties, not one hand backing away from it, begging off, refusing duty. Or that greater portion of ship’s company which, while protected from these onslaughts, had had to live for those weeks in that prison below decks, hardly knowing where their ship was taking them, no assurance that they would ever come out of it. Both seemed to me to belong in those higher realms of fortitude, one might say valor.

  * * *

  Never truly removing itself from that corner of my mind it had permanently reserved, ceaselessly emitted the off-and-on signal of a buoy off soundings warning ships of some treacherous unseen hazard, telling me that even once into freer waters we had precious little fuel left for any search for habitable space before we should come forever dead in the sea. Our course had been arrived at after the most meticulous consultations with Thurl
ow and Melville, the indispensable Selmon, of course, always participating in these discussions, held, as considerations dictated, sometimes in my cabin, sometimes poring over charts in the chart room. We had determined to proceed at the strictest speed I have described straight down the longitude until we reached the fortieth parallel, and there to turn due east, following then a course which would take us well off Australia to our port, operating on the assumption that it had suffered the same fate as all land masses we had encountered. Bearing always in mind that should events prove us happily wrong in this assessment we would, of course, turn back north to explore the southern littorals of the great nation-continent. Barring that unexpected development we would continue to stay well out, soon turn on a N. by N.E. course, pass through the Tasman Sea over Lord Howe Rise and make a final starboard turn which would lead us the last hundred miles into the vast reaches of the southern Pacific where all our hopes lay. Melville, continuing constantly to calculate and recalculate, was able one day to proffer me something precise that could not have been more welcome.

  “Captain, I have a piece of good news from the engineering department,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “This eight-knot speed of ours—well, sir, I figure if we keep to it, by the time we depart Tasmanian waters we will have added two weeks to our fuel reserve as previously calculated under twelve knots.”

  We were gathered around the chart table during the midwatch—the four mentioned officers—in the darkness of the chart room, the only light that shining down on the spread-out chart of the region, our heads in darkness. I looked where Melville was.

  “Well,” I said. “Well, now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville said. I could not see his soft smile; I knew it was there.

  “So we have six weeks to make our search.” I felt the enormous lift in all of us. Knowing at the same time that we were taking too much hope from this, still feeling that any hopes at all were best seized on. “I don’t know why that should seem so much better than four weeks. But it does.”

  “It does that, sir,” Thurlow, his dividers poised in his hands, said.

  “We shall certainly keep strictly at eight knots,” I said.

  “Every mile at that speed helps.” the engineer said.

  “That it does. And we’ll keep her there. So long as these seas hold.” Only they made it possible; rougher waters, we would have to increase speed to keep steerageway. “See to it, Mr. Thurlow.”

  “Aye, sir,” he said. “Willingly, Captain.”

  Perhaps overanxious, all of us, to grab onto the least improvement in our prospects. Nevertheless, refusing even to consider the danger that we were becoming hope’s fools, that night I turned into my bunk feeling more borne up in spirit than in any time I could recall. I even resumed the reading, that precious nightly thirty-minute pleasure reading, stretching back for years, almost to the beginning of my life on ships, given up of late from the sheer exhaustion that had always reached me by that time when we were making our passage through the dark and the cold. The book was My Ántonia. I read with satisfaction, forgetting, as in former times, all problems, all vicissitudes past and future. At the end of the half hour, marking my place, laying the book aside, shutting off the overhead light. I lay awake for a bit, feeling a comfort and a satisfaction in the awareness of the barely moving ship, its diminished sound reaching up to me through her engine room, the fuel that speed was saving us, increasing our Pacific chances; fell asleep. I was next aware of a strong hand shaking me. Unmistakably I knew it as Preston’s. I don’t think he was even aware, or ever would be, of the unnecessarily excessive force he applied to the objective of awakening one as boatswain of the watch; always immediately apologetic, as now, when one indicated the fact, my “It’s all right, Preston. I’m awake.” The instant stopping, withdrawal of the hand, the “Sorry, Captain.”

  “What is it, Boats?”

  “It’s Bixby, sir. Signalman third.”

  “I know Bixby’s rating,” I said irritably. “What about her?”

  “Mr. Thurlow”—he would be the OOD—“says you better come, Captain.”

  Fear—alarm—arriving out of the exceptional indistinctness of this message, I swung my legs out of my bunk and engaged the reflexive quick routine of an act performed ten thousand times, on a score of seas, of getting on trousers, shoes, shirt, when some officer of the deck had felt it prudent, for any one of countless reasons, to awaken his captain. I looked at my watch. It read 0245.

  * * *

  I could just make out first light beginning to appear through the twin ports of my cabin. The doc was there. Girard. Thurlow. They had all been up the night.

  “How’s she making out, Doc?” I said. She was in sick bay.

  “She’s going to be okay, Captain. Shock mostly.” His eyes were strangely quiet, meditative. “Minor bruises. Put up quite a fight, I’d say.”

  I turned to Thurlow. I had picked him to do the questioning of the crew. “Any word?”

  “Negative, sir,” Thurlow said. “Half the men, so far. Nothing. We’ll have been through the other half by late morning.”

  “Keep at it,” I said. “Whatever it takes . . .” I paused, looked around that circle of officers . . . “We’ll find out who did it.”

  “That we will, sir,” Thurlow said grimly. He more than anyone seemed to reflect what was in myself. I had wanted him particularly for the questioning; he would be good at it, ruthless.

  They left and I sat awhile in my cabin, doing nothing. Just sitting. I thought about Bixby; an unaffectedness perhaps given her by that Iowa farm where she had grown up. I remembered talking with her that night by the lifeline. The sailor’s uniform seemed but to enhance the unsullied aura of her young being, her body girlish and slim; a special gentleness seeming to come through, later feeling this more seeing her care of the two goats we had picked up, something both comical and strict in it; remembered her hands gently evaluating the lion cubs. Yet a good toughness about her I had felt. During all we had been through she had borne up as well as any, not a whimper, at least none I had seen or heard of; any kept inside. We had talked about how she became a sailor. The Navy was lucky; but nineteen, very young, very intelligent to have made signalman third so early. I remembered how with mock humor she had mentioned as of a great distinction her hometown of Odebolt, Iowa, as being “the popcorn capital of the world.” I had a choice of tears or cold rage; found in myself only the latter.

  And so I sat, a long time, listening to the buzz of the bell clock attached to the bulkhead above my desk, listening to time but not reading it; glancing at the gyro-repeater, also placed there but not seeing where it was taking us. I felt that strange stillness of mind such as sometimes, perhaps peculiarly then, comes to one in the face of the unspeakable, the unacceptable. Accompanied now by something cold and savage and of boundless sorrow. How terrible had been the chill in me, hearing of it! It was unlike anything else. Unlike the human beings on the beaches of Amalfi; unlike the animals in the Kenya bush; unlike those hands going overboard in the dark and the cold. One person. It made no sense. But there it was. Those had been purgatories not brought on by ourselves, at least not directly. But there was something beyond that. I suppose deep in me I knew why. Not wanting, not willing, to get into that, even in my innermost soul. Nonetheless knowing there that, the horror of the act sufficient in itself, shipmate to shipmate, that it should be a woman, one of but twenty-seven . . . this vastly deepening it. There came over me a terrible resolve. There was once a legend among men who followed the sea that every ship had a Jonah, or a potential Jonah, the metaphor broadly defined as anyone whose presence aboard might bring extreme harm to a ship, and I had known many an old seaman who believed that. I was not one of them. And yet my resolve seemed as theirs. We had a monster aboard this ship, loose among us. Nothing that had happened aboard the ship since I first took command of her—excepting only Chatham’s leading 109 hands off the ship—had anyt
hing like this effect on me, including the myriad travails we had been through. They, after all, were tests for sailors. This was the opposite of that. This hideous act: It seemed to profane those tests, to mock them; to profane fortitude, to mock valor, the courage of ship’s company in surviving them. To mock, with brutal scorn, something even greater: the sailor’s code, stretching back over ancient seas, held inviolate, sacred, in ten thousands of ships; among countless seamen; saying: One protected shipmates as brothers, now sisters too; one did not harm them. To do so was the ultimate defilement of everything a sailor was; that the sea meant.

  We waited for Bixby. She herself had been as if the act had deprived her of speech. Two days passed. We made our turn at the fortieth parallel, proceeding due east at our languorous eight knots on the course which would take us off Australia. I think I had made up my mind from the first instant of being told. I knew what I would do. I was waiting for Bixby. But nothing came from her. For the first time a terrible thought struck at me: Perhaps she did not know. We might never know who it was; he might remain among decent men; continue, the act not repeated, to the end to be an accepted part of ship’s company. The thought was unendurable; filled me with revulsion. Never knowing which out of all the faces one saw daily it was, all suspect. I rejected the idea, brutally. But its real possibility made the waiting the more horrible. No one of the four talking to her—the doc, Girard, the Jesuit, myself—at any point thus far had tried to pry the information out of her. All attended only to her care. She had suffered a mild concussion, perhaps a contributory factor to her silence. But one felt it was something beyond that. One day, alone with the doc, I asked viciously, “Was she a virgin?”