These various conjectures helped—but stopped far short of bringing me any kind of peace. The suspicion that hovered over all three of those whose very images kept passing relentlessly through my mind, each having expressed at one time or another that preference, being so obvious as to make one suspicious of the theory itself: that one or all had meant only to jettison, do away with the missiles, that something then had gone monstrously wrong. That only one had decided actually to attempt that goal the more likely theory, that he could have secured the necessary cooperation of the one with the other key . . . the mind fiercely resisted. Myself at first driven to the very edge by the effort to sort out, to untangle what could never be solved, as in some impossible feat of marlinspike seamanship . . . Delaney knowing the location of Girard’s key, Thurlow of mine, Girard also knowing the latter . . . it had taken me a while to remember that, a seemingly distant memory which I realized I was perhaps keeping deliberately shrouded in uncertainty, in imprecision, an intentional failure to remember, lest itself move me across that line, of a conversation in the cave in which having told me the location of her key, she had asked me almost playfully the corresponding information as to mine; the idea having occurred these past weeks that what had seemed at the time so lighthearted and happenstance had in fact been deliberate and purposeful on her part; this idea so freighted with horror that I banished it as a threat to sanity, along with one even more terrible, that the murders of eight sister shipmates had in some inexplicable way pushed her to what she judged to be an act of atonement for what the ship had done long ago . . . such speculations spawning other memories of what had taken place in that cave between us, these rushing in savagely to attack me. I had trembled on the brink of the chasm. And something else. Herself helplessly a part of the enigma, each time it rose in my mind, so did she, many other times as well; and each time myself, crossing unknown frontiers of sorrow, seized with a pain so great I knew I would not survive if I continued to allow it such free access to my soul. Her, the gone ship, the gone shipmates, all of it.
I had decided that it would serve no purpose to tell anyone of my and Girard’s backup arrangement, that Delaney had known the location of one missile-launch key, Thurlow of the other. So much was unknown, the knowledge might harm the memory of the innocent. But then, after all this time, I had determined on one possible exception to this vow of silence: the Jesuit, swearing him to secrecy. I had waited. Now I decided it was best for him to know; but more important, feeling that the act of telling him would somehow make possible what I so desperately desired: not to erase entirely the last shred of remembrance—I could not hope for that, did not even wish it; but to stop the interminable questioning in my soul, as acts of confession are said to do. And so, on this hillside in Antarctica I related the circumstances, most specifically as to who had had access to the keys, while he listened in a silence deep as that of the great white spaces that surrounded us.
“An accident,” I said, ending the account, surprised at the something like harshness in my voice. “It had to have been an accident.”
I felt I could live with that; not at all sure I could with anything else; suddenly aware that he, the most percipient of men, knew this to the finest degree of sensibility.
“I prefer to think it was an accident,” I said more quietly.
“I understand, sir.” He waited a moment. “The damned things were never safe.”
Somehow—who can ever explain the simplicities of these mysteries?—it was as if some intolerable burden were lifted from me; that I turned away from it; indeed that we both did. Faced a new direction. As if to say so, that the matter was closed, that the past was gone as all pasts must and we need concern ourselves only with the future, he spoke of another thing, even his voice wonderfully changed, in it an altogether bright if quiet tone.
“It looks as if we made it, Captain,” he said. “The babies.”
Some of that extra space in Pushkin will be a nursery. Three of the women are now pregnant. Ensign Martin, Signalman Bixby, Seaman Thornberg. The doc reporting that they are coming along fine. Their children will be Russian-American, American-Russian: Take your choice. Selmon was right about that, too, as he was right about so much: The next fathers of mankind are to be submariners.
He would never say it so I did, not excessively irreverently or sacrilegiously, I felt; perhaps a certain wryness in my voice.
“You mean God is going to give us a second chance?”
He allowed himself a soft smile. “Remember you said that, Captain. Personally, I never presume to go around quoting Him. But it does look that way, doesn’t it?”
Suddenly the profound Antarctic stillness was shattered by the three loud blasts of Pushkin’s foghorn: striking haunting and lonely over the great solitude of the world around us, seeming to roll and echo off the nearby whitened peaks. It was the two-hour signal before getting underway that had been arranged; summoning sailors to the sea.
“Time to climb down,” I said, rising. “We don’t want to be left behind.”
“Great Christ no, sir,” he said, quite vigorously, standing up alongside me. “It’s going to be much too interesting a voyage to be left behind. Just imagine. To find out what’s out there . . .”
His voice trailed away. We started down the hill and made our way toward Pushkin, her two ensigns fluttering in the cold wind that had begun to come off the ice cap, the ship ready to cast off on her voyage to rediscover the world . . . But that is another book.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: The Sword of the Fleet
BOOK I: THE ISLAND
1. Land
2. Band of Brothers
3. The Sailors in the Fields
4. The Other Side of the Island
5. Power
6. Mathematics and Gamogenesis
7. The Higher Purpose
BOOK II: OUR CITY
1. Our City
2. Aquavit and Rose-Tinted Cheeks
3. Four Hours
4. The Barents
5. Valid Messages
6. Standing Orders
BOOK III: THE SEARCH
1. Land’s End
2. The Companion
3. The Pillars of Hercules
4. On the Amalfi Road
5. The Land People
6. The French Radioman
BOOK IV: ABANDONMENT
1. No Exit, No Entrance
2. Turgenev
3. The Combat Systems Officer
4. Africa
5. By the Lifeline
6. Confrontation
7. The Animals
8. A Signal from Bosworth
9. The Desert
10. Unknown to Geography
11. Decision
12. The Parting
BOOK V: THROUGH THE GATES OF ACHERON
1. Eden
2. A Charred World
3. The Dark And the Cold
4. Exile
BOOK VI: THE LAST WOMEN
1. The Settlement
2. A Walk with the Jesuit
3. The Keys
4. The Arrangement
5. Worship of Women
6. Lieutenant Girard
7. The Cave
8. The Plan
9. Executioner
BOOK VII: ASTARTE
1. Advent
2. The Two Captains
3. Thurlow’s Warning
4. Last Chances
5. The Nathan James
BOOK VIII: PUSHKIN
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The Last Ship: A Novel Page 78
