“Even with the most farfetched aberration of the winds,” he said one day as we sat chatting in my cliffside cabin, “anything that was going to reach here . . . it would seem to be valid that it would have long since done so. Except . . .” He glanced out at the vast Pacific, at those horizons over which, if anything ever arrived at all, it would come. “I can think of but one circumstance that could alter that projection.”
“And that?” I said mildly. “Don’t keep me in suspense, Mr. Thurlow.”
“No, sir. The only thing that might threaten us would have to be if someone, somewhere, fired off more nuclear missiles, dropped more nuclear bombs.”
“Now?” I said in astonishment. “Who in the world would launch them or drop them? And at or on whom?”
“I’m just speaking of a very finite thing, sir. Surely we’ve all learned by now that in this field it’s difficult to speak in absolutes, absent evidentiary data.”
He was getting as lofty and as circumlocutory as Selmon sometimes had been. Understandably, it went with a profession in which the capricious, the unforeseeable, was commonplace.
“Try speaking some English, please, Mr. Thurlow.”
He smiled gently. “Well, sir, we don’t know what else there is in the rest of the world, especially in every particular part of it, do we? I hold as much as ever to the belief, all data as conclusive as you can ever get to absoluteness, barring visible authentication, that everything is gone. Correct that. Almost everything. Most of us have always felt that there were pockets of people somewhere, haven’t we? Still are.”
“Yes. I feel that, too,” I said, a bit impatiently. “Other people. We’ve covered that ground. Please come to whatever your point was, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. I was getting to that. Suppose one of those places was a little larger than what we call ‘pockets’ . . . Suppose it had some missiles . . . Suppose there was one such group somewhere else, similarly supplied . . . Suppose they let go at each other . . . given the record to date I’m sure they could find some reason to do so . . . and introduced a fresh new supply of rather large contamination into the atmosphere . . . suppose the winds, such efficient couriers as we’ve seen, transported it here . . .”
“Suppose,” I said.
He stopped. I simply looked at him. He remained entirely unperturbed under that steady gaze.
“You asked me about absolutes, Captain. There just aren’t any absolutes in these circumstances, are there, sir? And what I describe is no more than what happened before.”
“Quite a scenario. You wouldn’t care to quote odds?”
“Captain, I don’t think we can permit ourselves that indulgence where radiation contamination is concerned, where the winds are concerned . . . if we’ve learned anything we’ve learned that. But I will say, if not infinitesimal—we’ve learned also not to call any conceivability infinitesimal when speaking of those two forces—I would judge remote. Quite remote. I would go so far as to say extremely remote.”
“I’m extremely glad to hear it,” I said.
“Sir, one thing.”
“Yes, Mr. Thurlow?”
“Our own missiles. James’s missiles. Now added, Pushkin’s missiles. I was doing a few calculations the other day. I happen to have taken a look down at the two of them lying there so close together—must have started these mental exercises. What’s still sitting in the holds of those two ships . . .”
He stopped, as if sorry already he had brought the subject up. It was my turn.
“Yes,” I said. “Go on, Alex,” a certain insistence in my voice.
“Well, sir, their supplies have been scarcely touched. The James has forty-four Tomahawks in her magazine—seven hundred and four H’s in our old Hiroshima terms. Pushkin has twenty-four SS-N-20’s with eight five-hundred-kt warheads per missile—she only had to expend two: seven thousand six hundred and eighty H’s left. Together, both ships, a total of eight thousand three hundred and eighty-four H’s.” He had no notes before him and the figures emerged as tonelessly as a memory-perfect accountant reporting any routine inventory. “Do you understand what I mean, sir, by the possibility of there still being forces existent that could do it all over again—I mean recontaminate the earth’s atmosphere, or certainly a considerable portion of it, almost as badly as those things did before? Why, sir, one could simply look over the cliffside and strike the word ‘possibility.’ These two ships alone could quite do the job.”
Thurlow’s voice, all of equanimity before, seemed to my ear just at the very last there to have mutated a notch into something carrying the unintended tones of urgency. The ships were sitting just below us. We could actually see them. An element absolutely new had entered the dialogue, its chatlike nature abruptly catalyzed by those ships into something as real as could be, and strangely scary. I looked at him in a different way.
“Are you getting at something, Mr. Thurlow?”
“Nothing, sir . . . except the fact that the very existence of those objects—whether ten thousand miles away or a cable’s length—prevents me from ever being able to reach those absolutes you were mentioning. I take it you meant absolutes as to freedom of concern from precisely what it is they cause—when launched, of course.”
“Who in God’s name would launch them?”
“You mean ours?” He shrugged. “Nobody, I suppose. Their . . .” He hesitated, found the word. “Being means they could be launched. I believe you were asking me as to possibilities, sir.”
It was a merited reproof of his captain, a lesson in the most elementary of logic.
“So I was, Mr. Thurlow. And you were entirely in line.” Now I watched his eyes very carefully as I asked it. “You’re not proposing any particular action for us to take?”
“Sir, that is not my field . . .”
I spoke more briskly. “I asked you a question, Mr. Thurlow. When I do that, I expect an answer. I’m telling you to make it your field.”
“Well, sir, if you put it that way, I would prefer . . .” For a moment, the rarest thing in the world for this officer, he seemed to find himself unable to say what he wanted to say, as if sorry he had ever got into the matter in the first place, opened this Pandora’s box, his reward for doing what he was paid to do, analyze, complete with the best data available, every contingency, near or distant—his reward for fulfilling as radiation officer this essential duty, he must surely have felt, being to be most unfairly put on the spot. So be it, he seemed to be saying—since they want it, I will let them have it.
“I would prefer that the missiles ceased to exist,” he said. “Our ship. The Russian ship. Hugging our island.”
Coming from Thurlow, such counsel was enough to pop one’s spine straight up, while sending a trickle of chill down it. I addressed him now in a soft tone, full of some heartfelt undefined gratitude.
“I want to thank you, Mr. Thurlow. You have been very helpful.”
“Yes, sir. I feared I might have stepped across the line, mine of supplying facts and projections and yours of decision-making, sir.”
I kept my smile inward, assumed a bit of his own academic-lecture tone.
“You need never concern yourself with that danger, Mr. Thurlow. Ship’s captains need all the help they can get and are in no way infallible.”
He seemed to find it unnecessary, perhaps even unwise, to make any comment as to that observation. Lieutenant Thurlow was never an officer to be underestimated—and not just in his naval duties, but also in naval relationships.
Taking that as his signal of dismissal, he rose and left. When he had gone I stepped out on the deck that formed almost a bridge, looked straight down at the two ships, standing so near each other. I could see men moving around on both. It had always given me a sense of peace to do so, and of reassurance—they could take us away if ever need be. Now my eyes seemed to pierce their hulls and see what was inside them; my mind recalling Thurlow’s rather ominous words, “hugging our island”; seeing into their magazines, their huge inve
ntory of missiles, comprehending, as an absolutely new thought, incredibly never having had it before, that in the sense in which he had spoken they by their very nature constituted the most immense risk to anything you might care to name, anywhere; let alone to the place from which one could almost have spat on them. For the first time as I studied them, those two ships appeared to me not as sources of comfort, of peace of mind, whether as to getaway or defense, but actual threats; our very own ships seeming that to ourselves. It seemed wildly fanciful. Nevertheless I stood there for what must have been a long time, looking at them, pondering the possibility of the impossible.
Thurlow’s conversation: That had been a couple weeks ago. I had thought and rethought the matter. It would be a tremendous step to take. But then . . . what possible good could there be in retaining them? If Thurlow’s nightmare should somehow come true, in some unforeseeable manner . . . so farfetched also as to have to wedge itself into the resistant mind, yet its realization not at all to be absolutely excluded . . . an aggregation of armament of a virtually limitless capability, the literal disappearance of the island itself so trifling for it as to constitute but a minor side effect . . . What in God’s name were they doing there . . . doing anywhere? They would never conceivably be wanted by us to destroy anything or anyone else. They were in no way defensive weaponry. We were loaded to the gunwales with other armament for that; the Harpoon, the five-inch, the Phalanx CIWS; the Russian ship, similarly so. A species of horror struck the mind: There could be but one possible use remaining for them: to destroy ourselves. Slowly, ineluctably, my mind proceeded toward the unthinkable, of not just getting rid of our own Tomahawks, but of persuading the Russian captain that he should do the same with his SS-N-20’s.
Another consideration entered: If her captain said no as to Pushkin, would I proceed in any case to purge the James of her missiles? No reason not to do so. Yet I hesitated at that final step; the ingrained instinct of a man-of-war’s captain, the feeling that if we jettisoned ours, he should do the same. I was foolishly anticipating. Why would he possibly say no? Finally I reached a determination. I would put it to him. Let us both dispose of these things . . . James and Pushkin both, and let our minds rest easy. And with that decision mine did. I waited only for the appropriate moment to broach the subject with Pushkin’s commander.
Then I forgot the matter in the satisfaction of gazing down at the Nathan James. The ship even looked better since her biweekly runs. What a pure joy it had been to take her out to sea again, remembering my having done so yesterday. I felt a little sad that it would be four weeks before I would do so again; next time, two weeks hence, being Thurlow’s turn with his “port” crew.
4
Last Chances
The integration of the Russian crew into the community went off smoothly. There were innumerable reasons why this should have been the case, and hardly any why it should not have. I mention some of the former in no particular order. As would have been true of any man-of-war, Pushkin brought with her a wide variety of skills. Her hospital corpsmen found ready duty in our Medical Department, all under the doc; of especial contribution was that her complement included a dentist, since ours did not, his also taking up a billet there, and familiar already with the mouths of about a score of Nathan James’s company from that exceedingly welcome service extended us by the Russian captain at Gibraltar. The submarine’s carpenter’s mate joined Noisy Travis’s building upkeep crew. Pushkin’s company proved no exception to what has long been the case in the American Navy, a matter previously touched on, that an astonishing number of sailors come off farms. At least a score of the Russian sailors were of peasant stock and these were soon happily at work in the fields alongside our own men in Delaney’s crew. A half-dozen, two of them ex-fishermen, joined Silva’s fishing detail.
How alike are sailors of whatever national and other background! This was an essential ingredient of the ease with which the conjunction proceeded. But the chief reason was to be found elsewhere. I speak of that realization deep within, scarcely brought to consciousness, a tangible fright even at the idea of confronting it, that there existed at least the possibility that we were the only ones, seeming to mean that we must cling to one another whether we so wished or not: for there to be allowed any serious friction, for there to be admitted any force whatsoever that would harm this solely known community of men . . . such a liberty was simply not permitted us. We were all—irrevocably, to an absolute—simply too dependent on one another. It is my last intention in any way to portray us as saintly; it was not that at all. It was rather that our own existence was at stake, and men have a great desire to live. In his own way I believe every hand on the island, American or Russian, understood that transcendent fact and its unforgiving sequitur: There were too few of his own kind to allow that other, to tolerate any striking out at each other; for anything of the kind to get started, moreover, quite conceivably enhancing until it wiped out the last one of us.
* * *
Nothing could have so electrified our community as the news that the Russians had brought with them such a priceless gift, a supply of nuclear fuel sufficient to give the Nathan James five years of cruising time at fuel-conserving speeds. I want to emphasize that the hospitality, the entire helpfulness, exhibited by the American sailors to their debilitated fellow seamen was extended before the fact of the fuel was made known at a meeting which I called in the Main Hall so to inform them. However, this revelation vastly increased the already forthcoming and friendly attitude of ship’s company toward the new arrivals. They, before, looking upon us as their saviors for the succor shown when they first raised the island in not far from extremis state, we now in turn viewed them as our own liberators. Our gratitude had no limits. When from the cliffside we looked down at the Nathan James, we saw no longer a dead ship but one alive as she had been of old, ready to take us anywhere.
Anywhere? That was the question: Where should she take us? Where should we take her?
More than anything, there was the relief, of an absolutely instantaneous character, that we were no longer prisoners of the island. The door had been unlocked. All the inmates had been reprieved, pardoned; they could leave whenever they pleased. That was the feeling that in a great exhilaration swept like a freshening sea breeze through ship’s company. Looking out at the immense waters, they no longer seemed great walls enclosing us on every side, but rather free roadways now easily traversable. The overwhelming fact of this new mobility of our ship seemed in the coming weeks completely to dominate our community. Men could think, talk, of little else. At first there were aspects of it that seemed almost comical, if in a bizarre kind of way—as if everybody were going to rush down the cliffside, jump aboard saying, “Let’s shove off!” “Where?” “Anywhere.” As though if the ship had the fuel to go, that being what a ship is for, to go places, there could not possibly be any thought of not going. This shading after a while into a more sobering, almost contemplative assessment of the real question confronting us: What specifically should we do about this enormous new circumstance of our existence? Where should we go? Should we go anywhere?
Inseparable from these considerations, the fact of the island staking its own claim. Its very habitability as an uncontaminated place, acceptant of men, when all others had refused us, at first endowing it with an almost sacred distinction, it had by now reached much beyond even that status to appear in our minds as a place sentient, actively helping these once forlorn and homeless sailors, presenting us with fructuous soil to grow our food, bountifully adding its own edible offerings, its waters supplying us with an abundance of fish. Otherwise, this life providing many other things. Everyone was quite healthy in the salubrious climate, men had work to do but not too much of it, off-duty the island itself was a green treasure to explore. The sweetness and serenity also awakening the inner life . . . a truly amazing amount of the reading of books . . . men’s minds occupied by the project Lieutenant Girard had commenced in the Main Hall of two-hour sessio
ns in which all hands, rationed sheets of bond paper from the supply we had been hoarding, were meticulously putting down all they knew, all they remembered—an enterprise which absorbed, even excited them to a degree I could not have predicted. The long sweet days . . . they had adapted, learning, for example, as all men sooner or later do in the tropics, to take naps in the heat of the day . . . a good life, including even, a kind of ultimate gift that had somehow been managed, yes, women, providing that sexual satisfaction which so strangely alone brings peace to men . . . to sailors . . . the Arrangement working out astonishingly well.
Perhaps only the sum of its parts, yet seeming something beyond that, another thing, mysterious and wondrous as could be, taking place to a certainty in myself and which I sensed to be underway as well in the greater part of ship’s company . . . the getting of one’s soul back in the very nature of our new life. Men, looking upon what they had, giving the matter more scrutiny, were doubtful as to course. They waited, in a kind of second reflection; it was good to have a fueled, mobile ship anchored there in the sheltered waters below the settlement. Still they paused, much less taken than before with the idea that this was any reason at all to abandon so good a thing as had been granted them in the person of this island.
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