The Last Ship (24 page)

“But the message. . . .” Thurlow began, puzzlement in his voice. “Sir, the message said the standing orders were changed.”

I spoke evenly. “The message
broke off,
Mr. Thurlow. It didn’t say what the change was.”

“The North Sea,” he said in a mechanical voice, going on. “Then what, sir?”

“We will devoutly hope communications will open up in the North Sea.”

“And if not . . .”

I had had enough of this. I looked sharply at the navigator, heard the hardness in my voice come down on him.

“If we haven’t heard at that point, the captain will decide, Mr. Thurlow. And then so inform you and the others of ship’s company. Is that understood?”

I stood looking at him. I did not think he had been shaken. It was more a matter of perplexity.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “I was out of line. Aye, sir. It’s understood.”

I touched the navigator’s shoulder, squeezed it for a moment as though to steady him. The questioning, from him or any other officer aboard, was without precedent. I turned to the assistant communications officer standing just behind us.

“Miss Martin,” I said, “you will continue to send the message on all frequencies and in constant repetition until I give orders to the contrary. From now on, in the clear.”

“In the clear, sir?” she said, surprise in her voice, making sure she had heard correctly.

“In the clear, Miss Martin,” I repeated matter-of-factly, and she was gone.

I turned to the watch officer. “Mr. Bartlett, you will proceed on our designated course. Reduce to two-thirds speed. Wake me if a reply to our message comes in. Wake me if you sight anything. Or for any other reason in your judgment. Wake me in any case in two hours.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Two hours.”

“Course one two four . . . all engines ahead two-thirds,” were the last words I heard as I left the bridge. They and the clank of the engine-order telegraph.

I went to my sea cabin directly below and, removing nothing save my shoes, fell into my bunk and into the sleep of the dead.

I
t was a stretch of 700 nautical miles from the Barents into the Norwegian Sea and a point almost exactly astride the meridian of Greenwich, from which all mankind calculates time, where I knew I would have to decide. Running with all engines full, ahead of the gathering mountainlike black clouds which seemed as if they were chasing us, I debated with myself all the way down what to do when I got there. Continuing on course would take me straight between the Danish Faeroe Islands to starboard and the Shetlands to port, thence beyond the Outer Hebrides into the Atlantic. Wreathed as they were in swirling deep gray masses, visible a great distance ahead across the cold waters and of a particularity I had never seen in all my eighteen years at sea observing weather, I dared not stop at any of these places and longed for the open sea. But the more I argued with myself about it, the more I knew that, although as a seaman I wished to reach the free ocean, another course was first required of us. And that unless we went there to discover for ourselves, we would remain in a realm of doubt and ignorance which might lead us to commit selfish or dangerous or even mortal acts. I felt we had to have, in this matter, a knowledge from which the last shred of incertitude had been removed. Almost as if this were the justification required for taking ourselves completely and single-mindedly into our hands. Added to this, or rather in point of fact preceding it, a sense of plain duty dictated what we should do. Therefore, on reaching the meridian, I ordered a course change and put us on a S. by S.W. heading. We came down out of the Norwegian Sea and crossing over the outer limits of the continental shelf entered the North Sea. We crossed over Viking Bank, over the 130 fathoms of Dogger Bank, over Southwest Patch and the Outer Dowsing, over Kentish Knock—all waters I knew with great intimacy—and at first light on the twenty-fourth of December passed Chapman’s Light shining strongly through the mists, at slow speed entered the lower reaches of the estuary and stood in to Gravesend.

Lieutenant (jg) Aaron Selmon constituted a new breed of naval officer. He stood about five feet three inches and I don’t believe he weighed more than 125 pounds. His age was twenty-five. He looked so out of place in the uniform of a United States naval officer as to make one, regarding him in it, have to suppress a smile. He had about him a distinctly undernourished look. His head appeared considerably too large for the tenuous pedestal that supported it. His whole body presented an image of boniness, topped by a bony, angled face with a milky-pale complexion that appeared never to have felt salt spray, eyebrows so blond-pale as to be invisible, and sandy hair starting to thin prematurely. His appearance, suggesting something close to delicacy, was deceiving. I was to learn from his service record that he had been a gymnast good enough to earn a spot on the war-canceled Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in his specialty of the stationary rings, the gymnastic event above all others requiring pure strength. He wore a perpetual look of seeming just on the point of smiling, at life in general, one presumed. His voice was monotonic and gentle, in the tenor registry, and he never raised it. A kind of aura of sobriety, even shyness, enveloped him, which made one as relaxed in his company and often as unaware of it as one would be with a favorite hound dog. He knew little more of ships as such, or the sea, or anything nautical, than did the most abject landlubber. But he knew one thing. He knew how much radiation men could tolerate, and for how long. Every ship of our capability had this new officer billet aboard. He was our Radiation Officer, or RO. He lived in a world of figures, and of rems and rads. To assist him he had some of the most sophisticated instruments the ship carried. Two principal ones. One was situated in the combat intelligence center and could take the readings of the outside through highly acute sensors placed at various points on the weather decks, with, on the bridge, set alongside the binnacle, a repeater much like that for the master gyro established in the hull of the ship. In addition, should we require it, he had the most advanced portable rem (roentgen equivalent man) counter made, which similarly measured levels of radiation in the air and could further determine such levels in food or drink. He had been the subject of good-natured ridicule from the other officers as being an officer with no duties, with no one to command, a seaman who knew nothing of the sea, and it was true that you could go weeks without realizing he was aboard. He took it amiably enough. One looked around for jobs for him to do—movie officer, shore relations officer, bagatelle tasks which he performed cheerfully. Maybe deep within him, behind that soft incipient smile, he was simply biding his time, awaiting his moment, with a secret scorn for all of us, thinking just you wait and see. And now it had come. Suddenly there was no more important officer aboard.

 *  *  * 

It was a river like none other in the world, a seaman’s river. I looked beyond the ship’s bow and thought, as I had every time I came in here, how from this river the greatest continuous generations of seafarers the world has ever known had set forth to every corner of the earth, to trade, to do battle, to make mighty voyages of discovery. From here had issued Nelson in
Victory,
destined for Trafalgar and glory; from here Drake in the
Golden Hind,
bound for the first English circumnavigation of the globe; from here sailed the
Beagle,
with a young naturalist named Darwin aboard. I had taken the conn myself from Lieutenant Sedgwick, with Selmon standing quietly at my side and in front of his repeater. I had gone over the plan in detail with him and achieved his consent: to do what his instrumentation permitted us to do—provided always we proceed with deliberation, ready at any moment to turn about. We went in at dead slow under a visibility scarcely 200 feet. This in itself was not all that unusual: I had conned this same ship up this river with no greater maneuvering arc in the rolling fogs that chronically swept in from the sea, immersing the land and making that white curtain the ship’s chief foe in a passage up the river. But there was a difference in the fog that the ship now slowly breached.

The fog was mixed with something else. Something sooty, immense drifts of swirling vapors soiling the air and combining with the fog to form a viscous pall that shielded the very geography of the parallel. Over all a profound and sombrous silence reigned as of a place entombed. I had ordered all unnecessary personnel below decks, all hatches battened, and only the bridge watch was topside—and the lookouts. A double bow lookout and also along both sides of the ship forward. They could have seen but little. The vapor devoured all. I stepped out onto the starboard wing. The substance eddied in mute whorls, cold and blackish, around the ship, the vile and mephitic fumes seeming to invest the earth around us, flowing in tenebrous seizure over the Essex marshes to starboard, of which between the opaque billows I occasionally was granted a glimpse as onto a River of Woe.

I looked down at the green gleam of the starboard light—I had ordered our running lights turned on—and saw an astonishing thing: It grew dimmer. By the chronometer we were approaching day but it was as if it were just the opposite, that we were entering upon nightfall. It was as though time had been turned upside down. Not the faintest sound came from anywhere around us; only the soft swish of the slowed-down ship slicing through the river into the dark void. The mass of clotted air thickening with our trespass into it, the swirling darkness between bridge and bow, I felt even the ship hesitated, not the hesitation of a coward, but in a reluctance to confuse recklessness with boldness, a pause as before the most imminent peril. I kept expecting to hear from beyond that shroud of teeming silence the cries of human beings. I listened hard. I heard nothing. I felt then a strange, etheric sensation. As of disembodied voices from the shore, of souls already crossed over, whispering in hoarse and throaty injunction their threnody,
turn back.
I stepped into the pilot house.

Selmon was looking rigidly at his illuminated repeater in the swelling murk which now penetrated the wheelhouse. I think I knew before he spoke that it was no use. When he did it was quite matter-of-factly. I had said only:

“Yes, Mr. Selmon?”

He took his eyes off his counter and turned toward me. We simply looked at each other through the gloom in the immensity of a shared knowledge. It was at that moment, I believe, that without exchanging a word we first entered into that other knowledge, that henceforth salvation, if available at all, could only take the form of preserving a totally unwarranted steadiness of comportment, the outward naval composure which had always served ships and their seamen so well. I was grateful to him—hysteria, panic, was but a step away and here could translate into only one thing for the ship and her company, disaster—and also for the first time, through that reeking vapor that filled the pilot house, began to be aware that, never mind appearances, I had in this nonseaman a naval officer. I knew the figures by now as well as did he and hearing them, I felt an emotion whose nature startled me: An intense wave of loneliness moved through me. He had said the one word: “Captain.”

“Yes, Mr. Selmon, I know. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I spoke to the helmsman, Porterfield.

“Left full rudder.”

“Left full rudder, aye, sir.”

The ship began to turn, to swing and come broadside to the upstream, still swinging.

“Steady on course one one five.”

“Steady on course one one five, aye, sir.” I felt the ship come about and stand downstream. “Checking one one nine magnetic.”

As the ship receded I stepped out onto the bridge wing and in the cold and bone-chilling air peered aft through the miasmic pall. Its wretched breath, acrid and nauseant, seemed to scratch my very eyes. That lurid, anthracitic mask: it hung there now virtually immobile, obscuring all. Then, as I stared into it, the veil seemed to part now and then, if only in the slightest degree, a penumbra, as if teasing and tantalizing us, as though pondering whether, as a consideration for all our efforts, to give us some glimpse of what lay behind its dark cerements. Quickly I pulled the cover off Big Eyes and squinted through. The sullen haze held again, impenetrable. A trick. Then abruptly it broke once more, and I felt an icy chill that seemed to move up out of the ship’s decks into and through my body and to quiver it, a lingering shudder of the flesh. By a conscious effort I held still the trembling hands on the glasses.

My eyes straining to the edges of pain, I saw the lineaments of what appeared to be, or to have been, a thin tall structure of some sort, but now with large chunks gouged out of it, and what remained charred to where it appeared something like a smokestack in ruins. A tower. My eyes kept tracking it fiercely upward until halted by the murky turmoil that swirled around its top almost as if belched from the form itself. As I stared and held fast, the pall seemed for a moment to lift as a shutter lifts and I beheld an apparition. A clock. I peered hard, straining to read it. Then it was as if the very hands of the clock reached down with clear intention into the binoculars and slammed into my eyes. Twelve forty-eight. The clearing lasting long enough so that I could see that the clock had stopped. Then the shutter came down, the dark infestive billows licked across it and swallowed it up and I saw no more. I let the Big Eyes drop.

For a moment something like a seizure, a paroxysm, of nervous trembling, accompanied by a choking sensation, took me. I felt as though a terrible chasm were opening under my feet, beyond all soundings, of a depth greater than that of any sea. I reached out to the bridge-wing shield to steady myself, fighting, it seemed, for my very reason, until something welled up in me to stop it, some distant resource—who could ever know from where?—perhaps that of a ship’s captain’s surfacing inner knowledge of the awful consequence for his men and his ship, to whom his every allegiance belonged, if he did not; a moment in which all of our lives seemed ludicrously to hang in the balance, dependent on such a simple thing as my control of myself. I became aware of the ship moving downstream. I stepped back into the pilot house. I think it was out of the remnants of that daze that I spoke, or heard myself to speak and as if to myself only, in hoarse tones—that foul and putrid vapor had begun to attack one’s very voice.

“Anyhow, we found something out. The exact time. It had to have been just after the noon hour. Everyone must have been Christmas shopping. Big Ben.”

In the swarthy gloom of the pilot house I could see only Selmon’s face, dimly lighted by the ghostly glitter of the binnacle light and of that other repeater. He was looking at me strangely.

“What did you say, sir?”

“Nothing, Mr. Selmon. Nothing.”

I turned to the officer of the deck.

“Mr. Sedgwick, secure all lookouts. Then activate the washdown system.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Lookouts stand down.” I could hear the echoing words of the 1MC announcing system pierce the swirling darkness between bridge and bow. Then presently the ship was enveloped in an erupting high fountain of water from that special device created for ships of our mission. The coursing water washing her vigorously fore and aft, coating her weather surfaces with the object of carrying away any particles which may have fallen on her, filling her cracks and crevices so that the particles could not settle into them. As the ship washed down, I could see us beginning to come out of the river. Then we were clearing it and entering the channel. I spoke to Porterfield.

“Right standard rudder.”

“Right standard rudder, aye, sir.”

The ship turned sharply.

“Steady on course two seven zero.”

“Steady on course two seven zero, aye, sir. Checking two seven two magnetic.”

The ship stood down-channel. I spoke to Lancaster at the lee helm.

“All engines ahead flank. Indicate two zero nine revolutions for thirty-eight knots.”

“All engines ahead flank . . .” I heard the clank of the engine-order telegraph, then Lancaster’s voice. “Engine room answers all ahead flank. Indicating two zero nine revolutions for thirty-eight knots, sir.”