The Last Ship (49 page)

“Boats.” I could hear my own voice distinct in the enhancing shadows, the tones of a quietened and urgent plea. My concern about the one who had vanished was now entirely gone. I thought only of the one who had not. The ship was not going to lose anyone else if I could help it; and she emphatically was not going to lose her best seaman. “Who knows how much of a lead he got? It could have been an hour. It could have been two hours . . . He’s far away now.” I reached over and touched his arm and said the word. “He’s gone.”

He looked at his captain. In the chilling gloom, I could not see into his eyes, only a great muteness, a sort of stricken dumbness on his face, seeming to envelop his huge and desolate figure. Then he looked out at the unending trail imprinted in the sands, on into the desert distance. He would not disobey his captain, everything he was spoke against that. And yet . . . For a moment I thought he was simply going to turn and march off, following wherever those footprints led him. I tightened my grip on his arm, down into the hard flesh, my fingers seeming no more than would have a child’s to make a beginning on its circumference.

“Let’s go back, Boats.”

I could not be sure, so quietly did it come from him. He looked at me, then down again into that chain of footprints, and I thought I heard him murmur a single word: “Shipmate.”

“Boats,” I said, “they’ll be waiting for us. The others. The boat. The boat has to get back to the ship. We have to get back to the ship.”

I would never really know. It just may have been that one word that did it. To no one did it represent more—from no one need more. Or maybe a simple realization of the hopelessness of the thing, of its finality, out of reach now, of shipmates—of anything. He waited, still looking far off into that infinity of sands. Then his eyes came back and rested on me.

“Aye, Captain,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for us. We have to get back to the ship.”

T
he mind was obliged constantly to range ahead, groping, into all unknowns. In the event Bosworth produced nothing; in the event the Mediterranean should fail us, as now appeared almost a certainty. As we moved ever nearer Suez the process—intense, searching, rejecting nothing, giving punctilious consideration to all—was stepped up: What before appeared remote courses, distant and unlikely options, now came more distinctly into contention as this sea’s promise fell away. So it was that I had ever more interrogatory talks with Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, who was sworn to secrecy, probing him for everything he knew on his subject: vaporization, incineration, fallout, contamination, radiation—whether of lands or of people. Especially lands I catechized him about. What most likely happened where? So much was guesswork, as I have noted, but general expectations, always subject to later, on-the-spot verification, could be attempted—indeed, we had no choice but to do so, then to exercise our most prudent judgment of the moment; then hope. Subject to such caveats, his feeling was that two places offered the most promise, these being the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific; that somewhere in all their immensity of waters lay the best bets of having escaped. For two reasons: the relative paucity of worthy targets in both; and, hugely important, because of the patterns of the planet’s winds.

 *  *  * 

My hand moved, a finger extruded and settled itself on a dot in the very middle of the Indian Ocean.

“Diego Garcia,” I said.

More than anything else, almost more than for an assured food supply, I longed for replacements of the cores of highly enriched uranium fuel on which our nuclear reactors ran. (Myself always having to bear in mind that the odds were stacked quite heavily against
Pushkin
’s quest on our behalf.) Lacking new fuel, we would simply come dead in the water in a matter of months. Every day’s steaming told me with a certain ferocity—I heard it in the very movement of the ship through the sea, each wave she took as though counting down—how little time really remained to find something habitable; that without fresh fuel we might have to grab the first thing we raised, however unfavorable otherwise, and that when we did we should never be able to budge from it. Given the new rods, we could go on more or less forever—or at least five years. What a millennium that seemed! What a sense of freedom it would give us! What burdens lift. These obtained: We could vastly increase our range over the waters of the earth; prospect many more places for possible habitation; have a look just about everywhere; above all, do both things—see home and look elsewhere; not have to make the terrible choice that would otherwise be forced on us in not many days more—at Suez, with what effect among the crew no man could guess.

One matter stood much in our favor. Beginning with the
James
class of DDG’s, nuclear-propelled ships were built around a much improved nuclear reactor, and one reduced in physical size. The size permitted two reactors in a ship such as ours but at the expense of core life. To compensate for this loss a technology involving serial replacement of fuel rods had been perfected, meaning that it was now possible to replace a limited number of rods at a time, thus continually extending the core life (eventually a “normal” refueling evolution would be required but the “serial” method significantly reduced its frequency). Accordingly, due to the improved design, remote nuclear support facilities containing replacement rods existed in a number of U.S. naval installations around the world, generally stored on board submarine tenders.

For our purposes I knew to a certainty of but two places where such tenders, storing such rods, were stationed.

“Diego Garcia,” I repeated. “Nuclear rods. Plenty of them stored there. We know that. Mr. Bainbridge?”

We were in the chartroom, just aft of the pilot house, the door closed: Lieutenant Bainbridge, the communications officer; Thurlow, the navigation officer, present because of his large knowledge not just of his field but of geography as well; and of course Selmon. A shaded light shone like a stage spot from directly overhead down on the chart table and upon the Mercator projection laid out there.

“Of course, we’ve tried raising it many times, sir,” the communications officer said. “As we have every place else.”

It was one of the largest United States Navy bases in the world. We ourselves had replenished there and I remembered the facilities for everything, every possible kind of stores and in huge quantities. Enough food stockpiled, for instance, to feed vast fleets, to feed a ship’s company of our size to the last days of even normally lived lives, and uncounted tons left over. No place on earth was more distant from America. It had been built for no other reason than that the distance between the Philippines and the Mediterranean was so great. Something in between was needed to care for fighting ships. In such manner did a Portuguese name, a piece of land otherwise unknown, unvisited, unimportant, become—the phrase was—a vital link. Vital links brought other things.

“Their long-range communications could be knocked out,” I said without much conviction. “Mr. Selmon?”

“If they got those they got all the rest, I would imagine, sir.”

My finger left that place, moved, slowly, on a westerly course, into another ocean, came down on another dot, on our last remaining chance for fuel.

“Guam,” I said. “Also had a submarine tender stationed there. Storing nuclear rods.”

Even as I named the island, something hopeless and unforgiving stirred in my memory. It was also a mammoth Navy base, second largest of them all across the seas. When Magellan found it, he had started something for future generations of sailors—American—that he could not have imagined. Over the years the island had become virtually a Navy principality, as Navy as Annapolis, the Chamorro people the most U.S. Navy body of human beings anywhere; working for the Navy; their men entering the Navy. The Navy-Chamorro symbiosis was a thing all its own. On another ship I had put in there many times. A people gentle, quite lovely, altogether intelligent, with a pretty island, much larger than most, that rose from green-on-azure waters unsurpassed in all the vast Pacific. On its acreage, what the Navy didn’t have, the Air Force did. The long-range bombers. The missile-launching sites. I straightened up a bit, still letting my finger rest there. Things had to be said.

“Guam. That place was the biggest supply dump for hydrogen bombs, other nuclear armament, of any place outside the U.S.A.”

“I’ve heard that, sir.”

“It’s true. I saw it.”

“Did you, sir.”

Selmon’s voice was bright-toned, that of an apt pupil hearing his archaeology professor describing some historic dig he had been a part of. I remembered. Selmon at least seemed to want to hear it. And for this briefing, it needed to be put anyhow.

“They took a bunch of us nuclear captains there to see it. Racked up in those tunnels they cut into the hills, then concreted. All of them perfectly camouflaged—driving by, you’d see nothing but breadfruit trees. Then in the tunnels hundreds of those things. Thousands. They should have renamed Guam—Redundancy Island. Enough on that one island to blow up the universe, say six hundred times over. No island anywhere was anything like what Guam had become. Even more nuclear fuel waiting for us on Guam. We could pick up enough of it to go on forever . . .”

I stopped. In the realization, like a streak-through of horror, come and gone, that every word I said condemned Guam.

“So we can safely assume that Guam and Diego Garcia got scratched pretty early?”

“It would be a natural thing, sir,” Selmon said. “I can’t imagine them so stupid as not to get those two right off. The first wave of missiles, probably.”

“Well, they weren’t stupid,” I said. “At least not in that way.”

“No, sir. I don’t think they were that kind of stupid,” Selmon said wryly.

“The breadfruit trees,” I said absently, as if I had not heard a word he said. “I never saw so many breadfruit trees either, as on Guam. It’s a wonderful food. Quite interested me. A man could almost live off breadfruit . . .”

I stopped, shocked at my own meandering, and the silence hung. Selmon’s voice came through the dark, a touch of alarm in it did I fancy? I felt he was looking curiously at his captain.

“Sir, I’d say to stay as far away from that place as possible. It’s had it, sir.”

I smiled distantly. “Don’t worry, Mr. Selmon. We shall not go to Guam.”

Our minds ceremonially interred Guam—more accurately, left it a seared hump rising from the Pacific blue. For a moment more: I remembered good swimming at Guam, Tumon Bay, the water clear and sparkling a hundred feet down. I laughed abruptly, sensing that this startled my officers, as well it might, a spectral laugh to my own ears.

“Gentlemen, I was just thinking. The very
first
bomb, that toy, the Hiroshima one, took off from Tinian, sister Marianas island, right next door to Guam, as we all know. I was just thinking something extremely banal. The same thing perfected a thousandfold coming back to exterminate the place that first sent it off. Mr. Bainbridge.”

“Sir?”

“The communications situation with Guam?”

“Same as Diego Garcia, sir. Often tried. Nothing raised.”

I revved back, composed and analytical. “Then that is that.”

Diego Garcia . . . Guam. They seemed our last bets for nuclear fuel replenishment; the urgency of thinking of a reachable place that would take us in so suddenly enhanced.

“Gentlemen, I would say we were looking for a place so useless, worthless, good-for-nothing, far from anything that was anything, that absolutely nobody could find any good and logical reason, or any reason at all, to do away with it—in short, the dregs, or at least the ends, of the earth. Would you agree, Mr. Selmon?”

“From a radiation standpoint, sir,” the young officer said, “you probably couldn’t describe it better.”

Now we bent over again, studying the Mercator projection Thurlow had laid out of the Southern Hemisphere. We commenced looking for tiny dots on vast reaches of ocean. Selmon had educated me: the smaller the body of land, the more surrounded by water, the farther away from any mainland, the greater the chances of habitability. Thus—if we should find nothing else—minds searching with fierce diligence for that one point of earth set somewhere in millions of square miles of ocean that would receive us, sustain us: some last resort to fall back on if need be. We peered at minute and faraway clusters in the two ocean vastnesses, as if one might say, “Come here.” The chart spoke not at all. I turned to the navigator.

“Mr. Thurlow,” I said, “I want you to prepare a list of every island found on any chart of these regions, the list to have one restriction: to qualify, it has to be distant from any conceivable target. Then find out everything you can about it. From the hydrographic charts and studies in our marine shelf. Also we’ve got the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The climate. What might grow there. The place mustn’t have too many people. And what people they do have, their nature and characteristics. Not of a hostile enough character, or in numbers sufficient to overwhelm the ship. Whatever you can find. All you can find.”

“I understand, sir. Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Thurlow.”

“The best place of all might be a place that is off the map. One completely unknown to geography. Some island listed nowhere. There are always such places. Places passed by. Uninhabited places. Some of them very possibly capable of supporting men; determined men.” He waited a second, adding curiously, “And women. By definition, places that no one got around to simply because they were so out of the way—out of the mainstream. Of trade routes, commerce, of the normal sea-lanes—of no imaginable potential, strategic or tactical. And thus directly to our purpose. Not necessarily bad places in themselves.” I heard a slight, sardonic laugh. “Grass grows on them, that is. Not at all necessarily sandspits.”

We paused before this portrait. Lieutenant Thurlow: Some of his speculations I had found to my own mind remote, unrealistic; but others, ones no one else thought of or imagined, in the event turning out to be true. There was a considerable silence. Then Selmon, in tones of rather wry musing:

“You know what would probably be the best bet of all, sir?” Startling us, the radiation officer gave an abrupt laugh of his own—coming more seldom, more sardonic than Thurlow’s, that of a man who saw life as it was. Selmon’s hand reached out; hesitated, hovering over the chart like a blessing and a hope; then the forefinger poked out and landed on a larger place deep in the chart; as far down, in fact, as you could go.

“Antarctica. It just might be the one place to remain free of any fallout—now or forever.”

Weirdly the adverb, one become strange to us, seemed to give back an echo. It required verification. I turned toward him.

“Did you say ‘forever’?”

“It’s possible, sir. Nothing certified on these things, as we know, but . . . I’ve been doing the calculations. There’s quite a fair chance that it would have all dissipated before it reached there; using up itself on the rest of the earth; the main point being that the air flow into Antarctica from anywhere else is so small that there is nothing or very little the contamination could travel on.”

“That’s rather sweet to visualize, Mr. Selmon.”

“Not so strange that it would come through. Really the one faraway place. The North Pole: it’s actually quite close to places inhabited by man. Why, we know the Russians actually stationed ballistic-missile submarines right beneath the Arctic ice pack. The Arctic’s got people. The Antarctic couldn’t be more different. No people. Surrounded by the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian oceans coming together—separated from other continents by hundreds of miles of open sea, the place utterly remote. In the Arctic, ice starting at the seventieth parallel; the Antarctic the fiftieth. In fact the Arctic would have been one of the first places to go—those Russian subs if nothing else. Not a doubt that the Antarctic will be the last—if it goes at all.”