by Herman Wouk
Harding said, “He’s in the charthouse.”
“Condition Bligh?”
“Not really. Convulsion second class.”
“Well, good- Rolling a bit.”
“A bit.”
The red light flashing up in the charthouse as Willie shut the door showed Queeg and Maryk bent over the desk, both in their underwear. The captain glanced sideways, closing one eye, and said, “Willie, you’ve been keeping this typhoon chart, hey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, since Mr. Maryk has been unable to explain satisfactorily why such a serious responsibility was delegated without my permission or approval, I suppose you have no explanation, either?”
“Sir, I figured that anything I did to improve my professional competence would be very welcome.”
“Well, you’re quite right there, it certainly can stand improving-but-well, then, why are you making such a botch of it, hey?”
“Sir?”
“Sir, my foot! Where’s any typhoon warnings between the Philippines and Ulithi? You mean to tell me there aren’t any, this time of year?”
“No, sir. It’s unusual, I know, but the area’s all clear-”
“Unless your radio gang has fouled up some call sign or doped off copying some storm warning or it got lost in your efficient files instead of being decoded and plotted on this chart-”
“I don’t think that’s happened, sir-”
Queeg made the chart rattle, tapping it with his forefinger. “Well, the barometer’s dropped fourteen points tonight and the wind’s shifting every couple of hours to the right and it’s force seven right now. I want you to double-check the skeds for the last forty-eight hours, and I want all storm warnings broken instantly and brought to me, and hereafter Mr. Maryk will keep the typhoon chart.”
“Aye aye, sir.” A sudden sharp roll threw Willie off balance and he fell against Queeg. The feel of the captain’s dank naked skin was horrid to him. He jumped away. “Sorry, sir.”
“Kay. Get going.”
Willie went to the radio shack, checked through the Fox schedules, and found nothing. He drank coffee with the bleary, white-faced operators and left, glad to escape from the nightmarish beep-beeps. He had hardly dozed off in his bunk when the same radioman who had brought the coffee shook him awake. “Storm warning, sir. All ships from CincPoa. Just came in.”
Willie decoded the message and brought it up to the charthouse. Queeg was lying in the bunk, smoking. Maryk perched on the stool, his head resting on his arms on the desk.
“Ah, found something, did you? I thought so.” The captain took the message and read it.
“Sir, I didn’t find it in any back skeds. It came in ten minutes ago-”
“I see. Just another one of those funny coincidences that dot your career, Willie, hey? Well, I’m glad I got you to check, anyway, although of course it just came in. Plot it, Steve.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The exec studied the penciled slip and picked up his dividers. “That might be it, sir. East and south of us-three hundred miles- Let’s see. Three hundred seventeen, exactly- They call it a mild circular disturbance, though-”
“Well, fine. The milder the better.”
“Sir,” said Willie, “if you think I’m lying about that despatch you can check in the radio shack-”
“Why, Willie, who’s accusing anybody of lying?” The captain smiled slyly, his face lined with black wrinkles in the red light, and puffed on his cigarette. The glowing end was queerly whitish.
“Sir, when you say a funny coincidence-”
“Ah, ah, Willie, don’t go reading meeen-ings,” sang the captain. “That’s the sure sign of a guilty conscience. You can go now.”
Willie felt the all-familiar knotted sickness in his stomach and pounding of the heart. “Aye aye, sir.” He went out on the wing and stood where the fresh air could blow in his face. When the ship rolled to port his chest pressed on the bulwark until he seemed to be lying on a metal projection looking down into the sea. The next moment he had to cling to the bulwark to keep from toppling backward. He felt his hands trembling on the dank, slippery edge of the bulwark. He stayed on the bridge, snuffing the wind and staring out over the heaving, choppy sea until Paynter came up to relieve the deck. Then he went below with Harding, and the two officers drank coffee standing up in the dark wardroom, each with an elbow hooked around a stanchion. A small red glow came from the heating grill of the Silex.
“Rolling’s worse,” Harding said.
“Not as bad as outside Frisco last year.”
“No. ... Any typhoons around?”
“No. Mild disturbance to the southeast. We’re probably catching the swell from it.”
“My wife is worried as hell about typhoons. She wrote me she keeps dreaming we get caught in one.”
“Well, hell, what if we do? We put the wind on our quarter or bow, depending where we are, and get the hell out. I hope that’s our worst trouble on this cruise.”
They wedged their cups and saucers into the indented board on the side table, and went to their rooms. Willie decided against taking Phenobarbital. He switched on his bed lamp, read Dickens for about a minute, and fell asleep with the light shining in his face.
“How the hell are they going to fuel in this sea?”
Willie and Maryk stood on the careening port wing. It was ten o’clock in the morning. In the dismal yellow-gray daylight the sea was heaving and bubbling like black mud. White streaks of foam lay along the tops of the deep troughs. The wind pulled at Willie’s eyelids. All around there was nothing to be seen but ridges and valleys of water, except at moments when the old minesweeper labored to the top of a swell. Then they caught glimpses of ships everywhere, the great battleships and carriers, the tankers, the destroyers, all plunging through waves which broke solidly on their forecastles and smashed into creamy streams. The Caine’s forecastle was inches deep in water all the time. The anchors disappeared every few minutes under black waves, and foam boiled down along the deck, piled against the bridgehouse, and sloshed over the side. It was not raining, but the air was like the air of a bathhouse. Dark gray clouds in masses tumbled overhead. The ship was rolling less than during the night, and pitching much more. The rising and dropping deck felt like the floor of an elevator.
“I don’t know,” said the exec, “but the damned tankers are all flying Baker. They’re going to try.”
“Mister officer of the deck,” called the captain from the wheelhouse. “Barometer reading, please?”
Willie shook his head wearily, went aft to glance at the instrument, and reported at the door of the pilothouse, “Still steady at 29.42, sir.”
“Well, why do I have to keep asking for readings, here? You give me a report every ten minutes, now.”
“Christ,” muttered Willie to the exec, “it’s been steady for seven hours.”
Maryk trained his binoculars forward. The Caine shuddered for several seconds on the crest of a long swell, and dropped with a jarring splash into a trough. “Some can fueling from the New Jersey up there-broad on the bow-I think the fueling line parted-”
Willie waited for the Caine to rise again, peering through his glasses. He saw the destroyer yawing violently near the battleship, trailing a snaky black hose. The fueling gear dangled crazily free from the battleship’s main deck. “They’re not going to get much fueling done here.”
“Well, maybe not, at that.”
Willie reported the accident to Queeg. The captain snuggled down in his chair, scratched his bristly chin, and said, “Well, that’s their tough luck, not ours. I’d like some coffee.”
The task force kept up the attempt until early in the afternoon, at the cost of a lot of fueling hoses and steadying lines and dumped oil, while junior officers like Willie, on all the ships, made witty comments on the mental limitations of the fleet commander. They did not know, of course, that the admiral was committed to an air strike in support of a landing by General MacArthur on Mindoro, and had to fuel
his ships, or else deprive the Army of air cover. At half-past one the task force discontinued fueling and began to run southwest to get out of the storm.
Willie had the deck from eight to midnight. He came to the slow realization, during the watch, that this was extremely bad weather; weather to worry about; during a couple of steep rolls he had flickers of panic. He drew reassurance from the stolidity of the helmsman and the quartermasters, who hung onto their holds on wheel or engine-room telegraph, and droned obscene insults at each other in fatigued but calm tones, while the black wheelhouse rolled and fell and rose and trembled, and rain drummed on the windows, dripping inside in trickles on the deck. The other ships were invisible. Willie maintained station by radar ranges and bearings on the nearest tanker.
At half-past eleven a drenched radioman staggered up to Willie with a storm warning. He read it and woke Maryk, who was dozing in the captain’s chair, gripping the arms in his sleep to keep from pitching out. They went into the charthouse. Queeg, heavily asleep in the bunk over the desk, his mouth open, did not stir. “Hundred fifty miles away now, almost due east,” Maryk murmured, pricking the chart with dividers.
“Well, then, we’re over in the navigable semicircle,” said Willie. “By morning we’ll be pretty well out of it.”
“Could be.”
“I’ll be glad to see the sun again.”
“So will I.”
When Willie returned to his room after being relieved, he derived a curious warm confidence from the familiar surroundings. Nothing had come adrift. The room was tidy, the desk lamp glowed brightly, and his favorite books stood firm and friendly on the shelf. The green curtain and a dirty pair of khaki trousers on a hook swayed back and forth with each groaning roll of the ship, sticking out at queer angles as though blown by a strong wind. Willie wanted very much to sleep deeply and wake to a smiling day, with all bad weather behind. He swallowed a Phenobarbital capsule, and was soon unconscious.
He was awakened by loud crashing, smashing sounds from the wardroom. He started up and jumped to the deck, and noticed that it was slanting steeply to starboard; very steeply; so steeply that he could not stand on it. With horror he realized, through the fog of sleep, that this was not merely a roll. The deck was remaining slanted.
Naked, he ran frantically to the dim red-lit wardroom, holding himself off the starboard side of the passageway with both hands. The deck began slowly to come level again. All the wardroom chairs were piled up on the starboard bulkhead in a shadowy tangle of legs and backs and seats. As Willie came into the wardroom they started sliding to the deck again, repeating the wild clatter. The pantry door hung open. The china cupboard had broken loose and pitched its contents to the deck. The wardroom crockery was a tinkling, sliding heap of pieces.
The ship came upright, and dipped to port. The chairs stopped sliding. Willie checked the impulse to flee naked topside. He ran back to his room and began pulling on trousers.
Once more the deck heaved up and fell to starboard, and before Willie knew what was happening he had tumbled through the air into his bunk, and lay on the clammy hull itself, his sheeted mattress like a white wall beside him, leaning over him more and more. He believed for an instant that he was going to die in a capsized ship. But slowly, slowly, the old minesweeper labored back to port again. This was like no rolling Willie had ever experienced. It was not rolling. It was death, working up momentum. He grabbed shoes and a shirt and scampered to the half deck and up the ladder.
He cracked his head against the closed hatch; he felt a hot dizzying pain and saw zigzag lights. He had thought that the blackness at the top of the ladder was open night. Now he glanced at his watch. It was seven o’clock in the morning.
For a few moments he scrabbled wildly at the hatch with his nails. Then he came to himself and remembered that there was a small round scuttle in the hatch cover. He twisted the lock wheel with shaking hands. The scuttle opened, and Willie threw his shoes and shirt through and wriggled out to the main deck. The gray light made him blink. Needles of flying water stung his skin. He caught a glimpse of sailors packed in the passageways of the galley deckhouse, staring at him with white round eyes. Forgetting his clothes, he darted up the bridge ladder in bare feet, but halfway up he had to stop and hang on for his life as the Caine rolled over to starboard again. He would have fallen straight downward into a gray-green bubbling sea had he not clutched the handrail and hugged it with arms and legs.
Even as he hung there he heard the voice of Queeg, shrill and anguished on the loudspeaker, “You down in the forward engine room, I want power, POWER, on this goddamn starboard engine, do you hear, emergency flank POWER if you don’t want this goddamn ship to go down!”
Willie dragged himself up to the bridge, hand over hand, while the ship rose and fell on huge swells, still leaning steeply. The bridge was clustered with men and officers, all clutching flagbag rails or bulwarks or cleats on the bridgehouse, all with the staring white-rimmed eyes Willie had seen in the men on deck. He grabbed Keefer’s arm. The novelist’s long face was gray.
“What the hell goes on?”
“Where have you been? Better put on your life jacket-”
Willie heard the helmsman yell in the wheelhouse, “She’s beginning to answer, sir. Heading 087!”
“Very well. Hold her at hard left.” Queeg’s voice was almost falsetto.
“Zero eight six, sir, sir! Zero eight five! She’s coming around now.”
“Thank Christ,” said Keefer, chewing his lips.
The ship veered back to port, and as it did so a violent wind from the port side tore at Willie’s face and hair. “Tom, what’s happening? What is it?”
“Goddamn admiral is trying to fuel in the center of a typhoon, that’s what’s happening-”
“Fuel! In this?”
There was nothing in sight all around the ship but gray waves streaked with white. But they were like no waves Willie had ever seen. They were as tall as apartment houses, marching by majestic and rhythmical; the Caine was a little taxicab among them. It was no longer pitching and tossing like a ship plowing through waves, it was rising and falling on the jagged surface of the sea like a piece of garbage. Flying water filled the air. It was impossible to see whether it was spray or rain, but Willie knew without thinking that it was spray because he tasted salt on his lips.
“A couple of cans are down to ten per cent,” Keefer said. “They’ve got to fuel or they won’t live through it-”
“Christ. How are we on fuel?”
“Forty per cent,” spoke up Paynter. The little engineering officer, his back to the bridgehouse, was hanging onto the rack of a fire extinguisher.
“Coming around fast now, Captain!” called the helmsman. “Heading 062- Heading 061-”
“Ease your rudder to standard! Starboard ahead standard! Port ahead one third!”
The ship rolled to starboard and back again, a terrifying sharp roll, but in a familiar rhythm. The tightness in Willie’s chest eased. He now noticed the sound that was almost drowning out the voices in the wheelhouse. It was a deep, sorrowful whine coming from nowhere and everywhere, a noise above the crashing of the waves and the creaking of the ship and the roar of the black-smoking stacks, “Ooooooooo EEEEEEEEEEE eeeeeeeeeeeeee,” a universal noise as though the sea and the air were in pain, “Ooo EEEEEEE, ooooo EEEEEE-”
Willie staggered to the barometer. He gasped. The needle trembled at 29.28. He went back to Keefer. “Tom, the barometer-when did all this break loose?”
“It began dropping while I was on the mid. I’ve stayed here ever since. The captain and Steve have been on deck since one o’clock. This terrific wind just came up-I don’t know, fifteen or twenty minutes ago-must be a hundred knots-”
“Heading 010, sir!”
“Meet her! Steady on 000! All engines ahead two thirds!”
“Why the Christ,” said Willie, “are we heading north?”
“Fleet course into the wind to fuel-”
“They’l
l never fuel-”
“They’ll go down trying-”
“What the hell happened on those big rolls? Did we have a power failure?”
“We got broadside to the wind and she wouldn’t come around. Our engines are okay-so far-”
The whine of the storm rose in intensity, “OOOOH-EEEE!” Captain Queeg came stumbling out of the wheelhouse. His face, gray as his life jacket, bristled with a black growth; his bloodshot eyes were almost closed by puffs around them. “Mr. Paynter! I want to know why the hell those engines didn’t answer when I called for power-”
“Sir, they were answering-”
“God damn you, are you calling me a liar? I’m telling you I got no power on that starboard engine for a minute and a half until I started yelling over the loudspeaker-”
“Sir, the wind-”
(“Oooo-eeee-OOEEEE!”)
“Don’t give me any back talk, sir! I want you to get below to your engine spaces and stay there and see to it that my engine orders are obeyed and fast-”
“I have to relieve the deck, sir, in a few minutes-”
“You do not, Mr. Paynter! You are off the watch list! Get below to those engines and stay there until I tell you to come up, if it takes seventy-two hours! And if I have another power delay you can start preparing your defense for a general court-martial!” Paynter nodded, his face placid, and went carefully down the ladder.
With its head to the wind the Caine rode better. The fear that had enveloped the officers and crew started to thin. Jugs of fresh coffee were brought up to the bridge from the galley, and soon spirits rose to the degree that profane jokes were heard again among the sailors. The up-and-down pitching of the ship was still swift and steep enough to cause a queerness in the stomach, but the Caine had done a great deal of pitching in its time, and the motion was not scary like long rolls which hung the bridge over open water. The unusual crowd on the bridge diminished; the remaining sailors began to reminisce about the scare in relieved tones.
