The Caine Mutiny (52 page)

“Well, then, we’ll find them- I’m not disobeying orders on account of some bad weather-”

The helmsman said, “Steady on 000-”

Maryk said, “Sir, how do we know what the orders are now? The guide’s antennas may be down-ours may be-call up Sunshine and tell him we’re in trouble-”

Butting and plunging, the
Caine
was a riding ship again. Willie felt the normal vibration of the engines, the rhythm of seaworthiness in the pitching, coming up from the deck into the bones of his feet. Outside the pilothouse there was only the whitish darkness of the spray and the dismal whine of the wind, going up and down in shivery glissandos.

“We’re not in trouble,” said Queeg. “Come left to 180.”

“Steady as you go!” Maryk said at the same instant. The helmsman looked around from one officer to the other, his eyes popping in panic. “Do as I say!” shouted the executive officer. He turned on the OOD. “Willie, note the time.” He strode to the captain’s side and saluted. “Captain, I’m sorry, sir, you’re a sick man. I am temporarily relieving you of command of this ship, under Article 184 of
Navy Regulations
.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Queeg. “Left to 180, helmsman.”

“Mr. Keith,
you’re
the OOD here, what the hell should I do?” cried Stilwell.

Willie was looking at the clock. It was fifteen minutes to ten. He was dumfounded to think he had had the deck less than two hours. The import of what was taking place between Maryk and Queeg penetrated his mind slowly. He could not believe it was happening. It was as incredible as his own death.

“Never you mind about Mr. Keith,” said Queeg to Stilwell, a slight crankiness entering his voice, fantastically incongruous under the circumstances. It was a tone he might have used to complain of a chewing-gum wrapper on the deck. “I told you to come left. That’s an order. Now you come left, and fast-”

“Commander Queeg, you aren’t issuing orders on this bridge any more,” said Maryk. “I have relieved you, sir. You’re on the sick list. I’m taking the responsibility. I know I’ll be court-martialed. I’ve got the conn-”

“You’re under arrest, Maryk. Get below to your room,” said Queeg. “Left to 180, I say!”

“Christ, Mr. Keith!” exclaimed the helmsman, looking at Willie. Urban had backed into the farthest corner of the wheelhouse. He stared from the exec to Willie, his mouth open. Willie glanced at Queeg, glued to the telegraph, and at Maryk. He felt a surge of immense drunken gladness.

“Steady on 000, Stilwell,” he said. “Mr. Maryk has the responsibility. Captain Queeg is sick.

“Call your relief, Mr. Keith,” the captain said at the same instant, with something like real anger. “You’re under arrest, too.”

“You have no power to arrest me, Mr. Queeg,” said Willie.

The shocking change of name caused a look of happy surprise to appear on Stilwell’s face. He grinned at Queeg with contempt. “Steady on 000, Mr. Maryk,” he said, and turned his back to the officers.

Queeg suddenly quit his grasp on the telegraph stand, and stumbled across the heaving wheelhouse to the starboard side. “Mr. Keefer! Mr. Harding! Aren’t there
any
officers out there?” he called to the wing.

“Willie, phone Paynter and tell him to ballast all empty tanks on the double,” Maryk said.

“Aye aye, sir.” Willie seized the telephone and buzzed the fireroom. “Hello, Paynt? Listen, we’re going to ballast. Flood all your empty tanks on the double- You’re goddamn right it’s about time-”

“Mr. Keith, I did
not
issue any orders to ballast,” said Queeg. “You call that fireroom right back-”

Maryk stepped to the public-address system. “Now, all officers, report to the bridge. All officers, report to the bridge.” He said aside to Willie, “Call Paynter and tell him that word doesn’t apply to him.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Willie pulled the phone from the bracket.

“I said once and I say again,” Queeg exclaimed querulously, “both of you are under arrest! Leave the bridge, right now. Your conduct is disgraceful.”

Queeg’s protests gave Willie a growing sense of gladness and power. In this shadowy careening wet wheelhouse, in this twilit darkness of midmorning, with a murderous wind shrieking at the windows, he seemed to be living the happiest moment of his life. All fear had left him.

Maryk said, “Willie, think you can grab a look at the barometer without being blown over the side?”

“Sure, Steve.” He went out on the port wing, clinging carefully to the bridge structure. As he crept up to the charthouse door it came open, and Harding, Keefer, and Jorgensen emerged, clasping each other’s hands. “What’s the dope, Willie? What goes on?” yelled Keefer.

“Steve relieved the captain!”

“
What
?”

“Steve relieved the captain! He’s got the conn! He’s put the captain on the sick list!” The officers looked at each other and lunged for the wheelhouse. Willie edged to the rear bulkhead and peered around at the blurry barometer. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled back to the pilothouse. “Steve, it’s up,” he cried, jumping to his feet as he came to the doorway. “It’s up! Twenty-eight ninety-nine, almost 29.00!”

“Good, maybe we’ll be through the worst of it in a while.” Maryk stood beside the wheel, facing aft. All the officers except Paynter were grouped, dripping, against the bulkhead. Queeg was hanging to the telegraph again, glaring at the exec. “Well, that’s the story, gentlemen,” Maryk said, his voice pitched high over the roar of the wind and the rattle of spray on the windows. “The responsibility is entirely mine. Captain Queeg will continue to be treated with the utmost courtesy, but I will give all command orders-”

“Don’t kid yourself that the responsibility is all yours,” Queeg interposed sulkily. “Young Mr. Keith here supported you in your mutinous conduct from the start and he’ll pay just as you will. And you officers”-he turned, shaking his finger at them-“if you know what’s good for you, will advise Maryk and Keith to put themselves under arrest and restore command to me while the restoring is good. I may be induced to overlook what’s happened in view of the circumstances, but-”

“It’s out of the question, Captain,” said Maryk.. “You’re sick, sir-”

“I’m no sicker than you are,” exclaimed Queeg with all his old irritation. “You’ll all hang for collusion in mutiny, I kid you not about that-”

“Nobody will hang but me,” said Maryk to the officers. “This is my act, taken without anybody’s advice, under Article 184, and if I’ve misapplied Article 184, I’ll get hung for it. Meantime all of you take my orders. There’s nothing else you can do. I’ve taken command, I’ve ballasted on my own responsibility, the ship is on the course I ordered-”

“Mr. Maryk!” Stilwell shouted. “Something up ahead, a ship or something, close aboard, sir!”

Maryk whirled, squinted out through the windows, and grabbed at the telegraph handles, hurling Queeg roughly aside. The captain staggered and grasped a window handle. “Hard right rudder!” the exec shouted, ringing up full astern on both engines.

Visibility had improved so that the sea was in sight through the driving spray some fifty yards beyond the bows. A vast dim red shape bobbed on the black swells, slightly to port.

The
Caine
veered quickly, shoved sideways by the wind as soon as it turned a little. The thing drifted closer. It was immense, long and narrow, longer than the
Caine
itself, bright red. Waves were breaking over it in showers of foam.

“Holy Mother of God,” said Keefer. “It’s the bottom of a ship.”

Everybody stared in awe at the horror. It slipped slowly down the port side, endlessly long and red, rolling gently under the breaking waves. “Destroyer,” Harding said in a choked voice.

The
Caine
was moving well clear of it. Part of the wreck was already gone in the gloom. “We’ll circle,” said Maryk. “All engines ahead full, Willie.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The OOD rang up the order. There was, a hideous sickness at the pit of his stomach.

Maryk went to the p.a. box and pressed the lever. “Now all hands topside keep a sharp lookout for survivors. We will circle the capsized ship twice. Report anything you see to the bridge. Don’t get excited. Don’t anybody get blown overboard, we have enough trouble as it is.”

Queeg, braced in a forward corner against the windows, said, “If you’re so worried about the safety of this ship, how can you go monkeying around looking for survivors?”

“Sir, we can’t just steam by and forget it-” said the exec.

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I think we should look for survivors. In fact I order you to do so. I’m simply pointing out your inconsistency for the record-”

“Left standard rudder,” said Maryk.

“I should also like to point out,” said Queeg, “that twenty minutes before you illegally relieved me I ordered you to get rid of that helmsman and you disobeyed me. He’s the worst troublemaker on the ship. When he obeyed you instead of me he became party to this mutiny, and he’ll hang if it’s-”

A roaring wave broke over the
Caine
’s bridge and buffeted the ship far over to port, and Queeg tumbled to his hands and knees. The other officers slid and tottered about, clutching at each other. Once again the minesweeper labored in difficulties as the wind caught it and swept it sideways. Maryk went to the telegraph stand and manipulated the engines, altering the settings frequently, and shouting swift-changing rudder orders. He coaxed the ship around to the south, and steamed ahead until the hulk came vaguely in view again. Then he commenced a careful circling maneuver, keeping the
Caine
well clear of the foundering wreck. It was entirely awash now; only when a deep trough rode under it did the round red bottom break to the surface. The officers muttered among themselves. Queeg, his arm around the compass stand, stared out of the window.

It took forty minutes for the
Caine
to maneuver through a full circle around the lost ship against wind and waves, and all the time it wallowed and thrashed as badly as it had been doing since morning, and took several terrible rolls to leeward. Willie was scared each time. But he now knew the difference between honest fright and animal terror. One was bearable, human, not incapacitating; the other was moral castration. He was no longer terrorized, and felt he no longer could be, even if the ship went down, provided Maryk were in the water near him.

The exec was out on the wing, shielding his eyes from the hurtling spray with both hands, peering around at the heaving spires of black water, as the
Caine
steadied on north again. He came into the wheelhouse, trailing streams from his clothes. “We’ll come around once more and then quit,” he said. “I think it’s gone under. I can’t see it- Left standard rudder.”

Willie groped to the barometer once more and saw that it had risen to 29.10 He crawled to Maryk’s side and reported the reading, yelling into the exec’s ear. Maryk nodded. Willie rubbed his hands over his face, fevered with the sting of the flailing spray. “Why the hell doesn’t it let up, Steve, if the barometer’s rising?”

“Oh, Jesus, Willie, we’re thirty miles from a typhoon center. Anything can happen in here.” The exec grinned into the wind, baring his teeth. “We may still catch all kinds of hell-Rudder amidships!” he shouted through the doorway.

“Rudder amidships, sirs”

“Getting tired, Stilwell?”

“No, sir. Wrestle with this son of a bitch all day if you want me to, sir!”

“Very good.”

The door of the radar shack pushed open, and the telephone talker, Grubnecker, poked out his whiskered face. “Something that looks like a raft on the starboard quarter, sir, Bellison reports.”

Maryk, followed by Willie, went trampling through the wheelhouse to the other side of the bridge, shouting at Stilwell as he passed, “Hard right rudder!”

At first they saw nothing but peaks and troughs of water veiled by spray; then, broad on the beam, as the
Caine
rose to the top of a swell, they both spied a black dot sliding down the slant of a wave.

“I think there’s three guys on it!” shrieked Willie. He danced aft to the flagbag rails for a better look. A stiff gust of wind sent him sprawling on his stomach on the canvas cover of the flagbag. As he gasped and clutched wildly at the halyards to keep from rolling over the side, swallowing salt water from the puddle on the canvas, the wind stripped his trousers clean off his legs, and they went flapping away over the bulwark into the sea. He pulled himself to his feet, paying no attention at all to the loss.

Queeg stood in the doorway, face to face with the executive officer. “Well, Mr. Maryk, what are you waiting for? How about rigging your cargo net to starboard and having your deck force stand by with life buoys?”

“Thank you, sir. I was about to give those orders, if you’ll let me pass.”

Queeg stepped aside. The exec went into the pilothouse, and passed the instructions over the loudspeaker. He began to maneuver the lurching ship toward the object, which soon showed clear, a gray balsam raft, with three men on it and two more heads bobbing beside it in the water.