The Last Ship (63 page)

For a moment I somehow connected all of this with the incident on the cliff’s edge which at this moment seemed to take on a mystery of its own in my mind, something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I looked at his face as best I could make it out in this darkness at midday and could just discern his distant smile and—if I was not mistaken as to any appraisals in these moments—a curious—an astonishing—zeal, close to fervor, that made me feel a quiver of foreboding. Then, to my infinite gratitude, the twenty minutes—they had seemed far longer—were up, the rain had finished for the day, the bright sunlight returned, all dappled down through the trees, setting the drops of water glistening like pearls on the virescent leaves. I felt a decided shakiness inside, as though I had returned from another world. We stepped out of the trees into the sunlight and made our way back to the settlement.

All of these things I pondered. Not least, the near miss on the high cliffs. It was almost as if something had pulled him toward the cliff’s edge, almost pushed him. Dismissing that as instant nonsense. Not least of the dangers that continued to confront one these days, I reflected, reading things into things.

I
felt the hand shaking me, was instantly aware and alert. I recognized the lookout messenger Dillon. Behind her through the open door I could see the earliest blush of first light.

“Sir. Billy believes he’s raised a ship on the horizon.”

I scrambled into trousers and shoes. Moving fast out of the cabin, passing Dillon, following close behind me, now beginning to run, scrambling up the high ladder to stand alongside Barker. The last stars paled in the sky, taking their leave, and first light, borne on a pink glow that spread across the horizon, was just beginning to announce a new day over the vast and, to the naked eye, empty sea. Barker’s long lean form was still bent to the Big Eyes and by the way he was moving the instrument within a close, small arc, I was made aware that whatever it was he had seen, he did not of a certainty see it now. Still scanning over that arc he spoke.

“Bearing zero eight five, she was, Captain.”

He stood aside and I bent and came hard on to that fix. I looked for some time more; then swung the instrument each way, tracking twenty degrees or more in either direction. Came back to zero eight five bearing, looked some more. Then straightened up.

“Was,” I said.

“Zero eight five, sir,” Barker repeated firmly. “No mistaking. A ship.”

I had never known him to be in error on such a matter. He might not always be able to identify the object but if he saw something on the sea, something was there. I stood a moment watching him, looking up into those eyes with all their unblemished frankness, then turning to look out over the island’s treetops in that direction. I could make out the morning star, oddly itself on the approximate bearing on which Barker had fixed his sighting. The sun was beginning to climb the sky, bringing daylight to the unsurprised sea. Meantime he bent and looked again through the oversize binoculars.

“All right, Billy,” I said.

He straightened up.

“What did she look like?” I said.

“Sir, I had her in range about a minute.” He paused. I spoke with a touch of impatience.

“Yes, yes.”

“First light. It was hard to see clear. But she was there. I swear it, Captain. Smack against the horizon line.”

“You don’t have to swear it, son,” I said softly. “Just tell me.”

“I would have said maybe a destroyer, like us. But a fair size longer. Definitely not a merchantman. I could make out guns—maybe they were missile launchers. At that distance . . .” Yes, at that distance you could probably not make out the difference . . . “man-of-war. No doubt about that. Then she was gone. Maybe she dived.”

“Dived?”

“A sub. Maybe she was a submarine.”

Something jumped in me.

“Captain, I
know.
There was a ship there.”

“Yes, Billy,” I said quietly. “Well, she isn’t there now.”

I started to climb down; turned.

“Anything about color . . . shade?”

“Color, sir? Well, of course, any ship looks pretty dark on the horizon. If anything, I’d say she looked, well, more than usual anyhow . . . black. Very black.”

I turned back and climbed down.

If it had been anyone else I would have dismissed it as a mirage. We were big on mirages these days. Particularly of ships. Most of us, myself included, had imagined at one time or another that we had seen ships out there, far on the horizon. Seaman Barker had never had one such false sighting while on Lookout Tower duty.

And so I reflected. Subs know they can be least seen at first and last light—classically, for that reason, that is when they launch torpedoes. One wishing not to be seen would have his best chance then. She might not have figured eyes like Barker’s.

 *  *  * 

I think it was Barker’s sighting, whether actual or hallucinatory, that forced the matter to my mind: It was not inconceivable that the time might arrive when we should have to protect ourselves, this lovely uncontaminated island, which offered so much in the way of fecundity and habitability and to which we were adding so distinctively by our own efforts; it was just possible we might have to defend it against others who might raise it on the horizon, take a look at these exceeding virtues, and desire to have it for themselves. It was a finite chance. But nothing is more drilled into a naval officer than to prepare oneself and one’s ship for the event he is most certain will never happen. This in turn made it now seem almost incredible to me that I had not only done nothing about but had almost forgotten something else: the two keys that were necessary to accomplish the launching of the missiles. I now found it a shocking thing that I had left my key in a place I would go days on end without visiting—the captain’s cabin aboard the
Nathan James.
To be sure, in what would seem to be a secure place, a safe to which only I had the combination. Still, it was a matter of the most fundamental naval doctrine that the key, given the power of these weapons, never be in a location which its custodian did not inhabit on almost a continuous basis. I had been guilty of gross neglect of duty—if there had been anyone there to execute it, palpably a court-martial offense. All of this would surely be true as well of the other key, now in the custody of Lieutenant Girard, our CSO since Lieutenant Commander Chatham’s departure; her key, I knew, kept in Chatham’s old safe there, only herself holding the combination.

Now the matter suddenly became urgent in my mind: It must be corrected at once. That same day of the sighting I called Girard to my cliffside cabin; explained the situation.

“I want it set straight today, by both of us. And something else.”

I explained my feeling that Barker’s sighting, real or not, raised a concern of possible attack from the sea, in which immediate action would be required. We now kept a very minimum of crew aboard.

“I want a gunnery crew aboard ship. A small one—but continuous, permanent. Enough to man the five-inch gun, the Harpoon, and the Phalanx in a GQ situation while the rest of us are getting in the boats and boarding ship. How many men?”

She figured for a moment. “Fourteen would be able to take action, open fire, while the others got aboard.”

“Then see to it. Take the necessary men from the Farm, fishing, carpentry details.”

“Aye, sir. Will do at once.”

“Something else. We’re also going to need some kind of General Quarters alarm system here on the island. Bring the launch GQ system off the ship and set it up for battery operation. Install it on The Tower. Everyone in the settlement area could hear it, if we need to get aboard ship fast, get the ship underway. Leaves only the Farm across the island. The sound wouldn’t reach there. We’ll have to use lifeboat radios from the ship. Send one to the Farm, mount the other on the Tower. Keep a radio watch on the Farm.”

“That would work,” Girard said.

“I’ll get Thurlow on it. Now. About the missile keys. I want each of us to visit the ship today, each remove his key, put it somewhere on the island very close at hand. Since we have no ‘safes’ here, neither of us is to tell the other where that place is.”

“Of course, sir,” she said, understanding immediately. “I’ll see to it.” She had risen to go do so when I detained her.

“Miss Girard?”

“Sir?”

Even before Barker’s sighting had suggested the present unacceptable location of the keys—weeks ago, in fact—another matter respecting them had occurred to me which I also put away in the concentration on island business in what now seemed clearly an additional negligence of duty. Now it, too, had come surging up in my mind as a matter equally urgent to that of the keys themselves. While we were on the subject, it seemed the time to attend to it as well.

“If anything should happen to me—or to you . . . or to both of us . . . we should have backups . . . Otherwise, if somehow they were needed, the missiles would just be sitting there . . . no one able to launch them . . . The missiles would be locked in . . . forever . . . Are there two persons you and I could both trust? One for each key . . . one person each of us could tell where on the island, what exact place, his key is; how to get at it if that unforeseen thing happened . . . to myself, to you, to both of us. Each of them, of course, like ourselves, not to tell the other the location of the key in his charge. So that neither could get to both keys. Same arrangement as between ourselves. Each, without any reservation whatever, trustworthy; no problem in keeping his mouth shut.”

“That’s a big transfer of power, Captain.” She seemed to have a doubt.

“So it is. But the alternative is worse. Missiles frozen in.”

That phrase seemed to get through. She reflected a bit.

“I suppose we have to do it,” she said, still not at all eager.

We both pondered.

“Thurlow,” I said. “A natural, as exec. The other?”

“Delaney? A missile chief.”

“A natural choice. Thurlow and Delaney then?”

“Fine with me, Captain.”

“You have a preference?”

“Not much. Delaney.”

“Then I’ll take Thurlow.” It seemed a random thing. “I want the three of you to run through the launch drill. Next couple of days.”

“Aye, sir. I’ll lay it on.”

She rose to go. “I’ll see to the gunnery watch. Right now, if that’s all, I think I’ll go to the ship, get my key, put it—someplace.”

“I’ll go with you.”

Together, we took a boat out. I went to my cabin, she to Chatham’s old stateroom; each got his key, we came back. She went about her business, I mine. Myself first hiding my key in what I felt was an appropriate place, herself I knew doing the same. I sent for Thurlow, set him to the job of removing the launch GQ and two of the lifeboat radios from the ship to the Lookout Tower and establishing a continuous radio watch between the Tower and the Farm. Next I summoned Delaney and Thurlow, together, to my cabin ashore, and having explained the circumstance, that the secret as to the location of the respective keys was to be that of each alone, neither telling the other, under the same terms as existed between myself and Girard, sent Delaney to seek her out and to be told the location of her key, Thurlow remaining behind. I took him outside and showed him where I had hidden my key, near my cabin. After a bit we all came back. I wanted it got absolutely straight: no one else in ship’s company to know the slightest thing about this transaction. Girard and Thurlow left. I kept Delaney back to tell him about the gunnery crew I had ordered Girard to set up aboard ship.

“Would you like to go back to that duty, Gunner—or stay with the Farm? You’ve got it running so well I think they could manage without you.”

He grinned. “Not a doubt in the world about that, Captain.” He seemed to ponder the choice. “Well, sir, now that you mention it, I have kind of missed the gunnery and the ship, looking after the missiles. If it’s all the same to you I think I’d like to be back aboard for a spell.”

“I’ll tell Lieutenant Girard,” I said.

We lingered, comfortable with each other, looking out at the sea.

“Those damn things,” I suddenly said. “Those bloody useless things. Sometimes it seems like we’re spending our lives caring for them, doesn’t it?”

“Well, Captain, if it were my choice . . . May I be frank, sir?”

“Chief, I seem to remember you always have been.”

“Sir, I would have deactivated them and sent them to the Greenland Ice Cap long ago.”

I simply stared at him, startled by a memory. Once I had considered doing exactly that, back in the Mediterranean; stopped either by a captain’s inbuilt resistance to that act of castration, conditions elsewhere not so well known then as now; stopped also by the awareness that it would have been the last thing the then CSO Chatham, without whose consent and cooperation there was no way the missiles could be removed physically from the ship, would ever have agreed to. But now we had a new CSO. I was just as certain that, although in my mind holding the same right of refusal as had always existed under the dual-key system, she would do whatever I decided in the matter; indeed, its being by no means uncertain but that she exactly shared Delaney’s opinion. For the moment I stalled.

“There might be someone on the Greenland Ice Cap,” I said.

“Just a manner of speaking, sir.” He grinned again. “Let me study on it and see if I can come up with another place. Maybe Kingdom Come, as we say in the Ozarks.”

I
had had my separate quarters placed nearest the sea of any of the structures, extending from it a small porch or deck one could almost think of as the bridge of a ship, looking as it did almost straight down into the sea and from this vaulting clifftop vast to the horizon. Looking almost straight down also on the
Nathan James,
which I had brought for anchorage to this safer, leeward side of the island. On occasion the presence of the ship had come curiously to frighten me—an enigma seeming somehow connected with her power, her missiles, only twelve of the original number expended, though why this attribute, her having always possessed it, should suddenly become a source of disturbance in the mind baffled me. In any case this experience was rare. More often, to look down at her strengthened me, as now; perhaps as embodiment of all we had been through, survived; visible testimony, therefore, that we could survive anything that fate, never giving up, might still have in store for us. Looking at the ship, I thought again how God or that very two-handed fate, as one might have it, had shone on her ship’s company. I could not have imagined that things should have gone so well for us.

Perhaps I was summoning these thoughts to fortify myself now that we had come at last to the brink of a great unknown, the issues harboring the highest prospects of peril: the matter of the women; the matter of governance. How were the men to share the women? How was ship’s company to govern themselves? The former in particular: Its resolution, or the failure of one, I had come to feel, would in the end make us rise or fall, fail or succeed, turn this island into a working and satisfying community, even just possibly a fragment of paradise; or, tearing our ship’s company apart, turn it into . . . it did not bear thinking about.

I looked once more across the sea, a slight haze blurring the horizon; an impregnable void, I sometimes thought, an uncrossable barrier; the sea up a little today, its voice heard lunging against the shore far below. I could see thin strips of foam here and there, replicas of the cirrus clouds which streaked the blue above; a slight and benevolent wind driving them across the crests of languorous waves; a certain throbbing of the waters felt; the wind playing a murmuring song in the leaves of the tall trees, on the island green all around me. Both ways, up and down the island, the sunlight struck the red cliffs in a dazzling splendor. I looked down at the ship. I could see her communications antennas high on the mainmast, the radio shack still on the twenty-four-hour manned watch, kept with all the old regularity, never abandoned; so long since it had picked up anything of any kind, even the Russian submarine sometime back vanished from its various bands.

It was the day on which she was to bring me the women’s decision, their terms. I stepped inside.

 *  *  * 

Waiting for her to come, my thoughts coalesced around her and the women, and the crucial matter of what their relationship to the men in ship’s company was to be. During our time on the island, even as we sat there in our old way, going over supply and morale matters in general, in our accustomed fashion, as time moved, as we awaited the decision of the women, due on completion of the settlement, it was as though my sovereign authority was being subtracted from me in the exact same measure as hers increased. I think we both must have been conscious of a single fact more than of any other, the one fact that neither of us would ever so much as allude to in its inexorability but which seemed to permeate not just us but the settlement itself, ever augmenting, in a profound suffusion which in the sure sense of the most fundamental change about to manifest itself took on the aspect of something in equal parts obsessively awaited, mysteriously feared: the power the women were coming to have over us.

It was impossible for me not to feel a certain amount of resentment at this, however inevitable the fact, unreasonable as it might be in the circumstance of there being no fault of the women in trying to obtain power. I even sometimes thought, quite irrationally, how dare they do this, bring in their femaleness? But of course they had not brought in anything. They didn’t have to. It was there, that power, just by their being here. Though surely with their supreme if unexpressed cognition of what in the end rules the lives of men. Power simply from the fact of being female and in desperate supply; above all—when that phrase crept through the staunchest of barriers one erected against the very idea from the fact of its awareness tending somehow to bring on the most terrifying of emotions—of just possibly being, insofar as we knew, the last women; the reminder of the phrase seeming to invoke a feeling so totally antipodal as to send an invisible tremor through one’s whole being; that far from being objects of resentment they must now be lodestars of the most extreme care, the fiercest protection; that perhaps we were to fall on our knees and worship these creatures; as if God had been discarded, substituted for by women.

Knowing that to allow such thoughts into consciousness—even if they were based on rational considerations—itself would tend to distort, warp, even immobilize the new relationships we were even now undertaking to install, my mind descended, to preserve its balance, even its reason, from these lofty heights, to wondering, speculating almost idly, sitting there waiting for her: What was the thinking of the women? Surely they had to like the power. Not to do so would be to violate human nature, more specifically certainly womanly nature, even I, no authority, literally a beginner in the subject, at least that much knew. Yes, my mind let itself—made itself—descend almost brutally from these elevated postulations to come down to earth. Speaking sexually, did they look forward to that one aspect that was inevitable whatever the arrangement turned out to be, or were they seized with the most solemn trepidations, even horror? Were they overcome with delight at the prospect of such vast power, or dreading that sure price of the fulfillment of it? The fact that I had not the slightest idea of the answers to these presumably all-vital questions telling me how little I was into the minds of women; how abysmal my ignorance as to their inner drives, their mainsprings, their true needs, requirements; and most appallingly of all, as to the extent in which these might vary, woman to woman. Should I ask of her at least some of these questions, the more specific and, suddenly now, surely urgent and enormously practical ones? Certainly not, I told myself at once. It was the last thing I should so much as dream of doing. Assuredly not those questions, and probably not any other. I should stay out of it, according to my original intention, which I now viewed as immeasurably wise, let them work it out to the finest detail, not so much as touch it.

Nevertheless, one question especially had nagged at me from the moment the Jesuit had first raised it in our dialogue by the cliffside: his report that some of ship’s company were beginning to have “moral” reservations as to the arrangement now being devised, correctly certain that whatever it turned out to be in its details, it would have profound and fundamental differences to anything they had known. Myself hugely aware, as of an extreme navigational peril seen dead ahead of a ship, that any serious division of the settlement into “moral” and “immoral” groups would be fraught with the most dread possibilities . . . I had wished to get from her the information as to whether any women were included in those having such caveats. I dared not ask even that, such a question perhaps more than any other certain to be considered by her a breach of my promise, my decision, to leave the matter to them, the women. I must stick to course: Unless she herself brought these considerations up . . . asked for advice . . . presented mere suggestions as concerned arrangements . . . perhaps I should stay out of it even then.

In fact, she had come to me, not a few days back, and then, without my asking for it, and indeed surprised, almost startled, to hear her doing so, began to give me an interim report.

The truth was, besides all the sundry philosophical reasons just given, I did not really want to hear what discussions the women were having; what various, perhaps myriad alternative plans they were considering, evaluating. She appeared to feel differently—up to a point. To want to discuss it within limits—her limits. Perhaps simply to get another, and a man’s, thinking, as I had so often hers in transposed situations. When she spoke it was almost as if our roles had been reversed, that she was the captain and I a trusted subordinate to whom she was accustomed to turn as a sounding-board for various ideas under her authoritarian consideration. She spoke to the subject abruptly—no preparation, no leading up to it, no transition. But also as matter-of-factly as if she were discussing some routine, if important, decision as to any other matter involving ship’s company—daily inspections, liberty rotation. Calm, seamanlike as could be, she was into it before I could stop her.

“I think as many plans have been suggested as there are women,” she said, in the tones of a naval briefing. “Our discussions are very free. We are getting close. We are considering every possible . . .” She hesitated. “. . . Arrangement. There are difficulties . . . One woman says she will have no part of it.”

“Her name?” It shot out of me.

“Coxswain Meyer.”

“Any special reason?”

“Billy. Seaman Barker. They want themselves for themselves.”

“I understand.”

“Well, I don’t. It’s completely unacceptable, of course.” She spoke forcefully, the aura of authority palpable around her. “If we’re to allow such a thing we might as well forget the whole business we’re trying to work out. It’s difficult enough without that.” Her voice turned sardonic—and instructive. “I’m afraid falling in love is going to be the first thing forbidden. If we allow one . . . none of this will work.”

All this concerned the women, and that part of it I had of my own volition surrendered as far as any control was concerned: all left to them. Yet, before I could stop myself, sheer curiosity barreled me along.

“Does any one woman have the option to refuse to participate at all?”

“We are deliberating that principle. Of course I have explained to them quite diligently that if one does so, it means that . . . that many more . . . for the rest of them . . . One suggestion was . . .”

“Lieutenant,” I said rather sharply, coming to my senses, appalled that I had let myself get this far into it. “I do not want to hear another word.”

A rather pleasing thought had suddenly occurred to me. It was not a new principle. Responsibility. I as captain lived under it incessantly. It was high time they realized there were two sides to this business of power. I spoke distinctly.

“You—the women—are to decide all these questions among yourselves. As previously arranged.”

“Aye, sir. I was only answering the captain’s questions.” Quite briskly.

I took the reproof. “I was in error to ask them. I will not do so again. Do not tell me about it. Tell me only what you have decided—when.”

“Aye, sir. We will meet your deadline.”

“Four days?”

“Four days, sir.”

“If you require more time I can extend.”

“Four days will be adequate, sir. We will have our decision within four days. We are very near already.”

Just before she went, seeming an afterthought:

“Oh, by the way, sir. No word on the Russians?”

“Not for six months now.” I repeated what I had already kept her informed of, bringing her up to date after we emerged from the dark and the cold. “Not since that point off Karsavina. As you know, repeated attempts to raise them on the arranged frequency—and on many others. No replies. Lost at sea, presumably . . . we’ll never know.”

“And yet you’re having that extra dormitory built. It would just about house
Pushkin
’s ship’s company.”

She missed nothing. I smiled. “Just in case. Nothing lost. If not the Russians, the space shouldn’t go wasted.”

Not missing that, either.

“How farsighted,” she said briefly, returned: “Other than—one would hope they are not lost . . . but as to coming here . . . Just as well, I suppose. It would have complicated matters.”

Unspoken the phrase, “especially for the women.” Their never having been specified in my talks with the Russian captain as part of the agreement—its being equally obvious that they could scarcely not be. I hesitated a moment, uncertain of whether to say it; then, despite its vast uncertainty, its perhaps irrational premise, I felt I had a moral obligation to do so, her being privy to the arrangement with the Russian commander; also important to say it in that I needed someone to say it to, for a response to a perhaps bizarre idea, specifically, to test it.

“You know that ship Billy thought he sighted?”

The word of that had spread quickly through the settlement.

“Yes, sir?”

“I even had the idea it might have been the Russian.”

“My God. Doing what?”

“Who knows? Approaching just enough to have a look at us. Disappears. Dives. For the time being. All this at first light, his best chance of not being seen while seeing us. Reconnoitering us.”

She looked astonished. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. One gets ideas. Perhaps he has in mind to sink the J
ames.
Easy to do with her just sitting there, skeleton crew aboard. You don’t have to look at me as if I’d gone round the bend, Miss Girard.”

“No, sir. I’m just trying to grasp the idea.”

“I don’t really believe it,” I said quietly, “in case you’re worried about me. But we can’t afford . . . in our situation . . . to disbelieve anything until we’re shown otherwise, can we? If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that.”

“Aye, sir, there’s a truth.” I could sense her actually coming around more at least to the possibility, however remote . . . examining it.

“When I was on the Tower I had a moment’s thought of sending the ship to search for him. Decided no. It would leave the island undefended. He could just come in.”

“And do what?”

“As to that . . . one can only speculate: Here’s a working, functioning island. The only known habitable space. The Farm, the settlement, good fishing. All the needs of man. All ready for someone to move in.”