The Last Ship (46 page)

“Aside from that, it doesn’t alter a scratch our previous projections. If the objective is somehow to connect up with the human being, if there is one, or a thousand of them, holed up somehow in Bosworth, Missouri—though the reason for such an undertaking escapes me—how does anyone propose to get there? I don’t suppose, sir, you want me to go through all the reasons again. I would have thought we had them memorized by now. But once more, sir. That land is fully, absolutely, contaminated; it will accept no human being; it is untraversable.”

Chatham: “I consider that speculation; but let’s say it’s true. Then let us be absolutely certain on this one—by having a look. He’s obviously not receiving our reply.” He turned to Bainbridge. “Wouldn’t you say so, Lieutenant?”

“It would seem self-evident.”

One had to admire the closely reasoned argument the CSO was pursuing, as well as his subtle efforts to enlist allies as he went. He continued, pressing his advantage. “It’s not just Bosworth, Captain. It couldn’t be
just
Bosworth. That signal means there are almost to a certainty others not just in Bosworth—but other places back there, maybe many of them, maybe considerable numbers of people; unlucky enough not to have Bosworth’s global communications and so unable to tell anybody. So
let’s go find out;
at least get nearer to where maybe he can hear us. No, I’m not forgetting fuel. If the worst comes to the worst, and we truly can’t get ashore, there have to be fallback places. Bermuda. Caribbean islands. Some place down there. We can at least be near—waiting it out perhaps while the place clears up sufficiently to receive reconnoitering parties. I’d like to lead the first one.”

“There won’t be,” Selmon said flatly, as if he were correcting a pupil far out of his depth and not particularly bright anyhow—not one of the radiation officer’s more attractive traits, part of that generally increasing loftiness of manner that was coming to characterize him. It could put anybody’s back up, let alone Chatham, whose back went up pretty quickly as it was. He continued with something like weary patience. “We’ve gone into all this, but I’ll say it again: The winds, their cargo—the pattern of winds west to east will have taken out the last one of those islands. That’s flat; the last thing it is is hypothetical.”

“Mr. Selmon . . .” Chatham, his voice barely concealing disdain. “I wish I was as certain about visible things as you are about invisible ones.”

“Why, that’s the difference in our fields, Henry.” The radiation officer smiled distantly. His refusal to be made angry was one of his most formidable assets; the reaction of a slight but unmistakable condescension, as now, indeed sometimes prompting that emotion in others; his tone not much off the derisive with an officer considerably senior in rank to himself. “I’m sorry you don’t understand that some fields of knowledge—example, yours, weapons—by their nature deal with matters that are visible; others also by their nature—example, mine, radiation—with matters that are not. That difference doesn’t make either knowledge, or either field, the less viable.”

“Mr. Selmon, do you
ever
consider the possibility that you may be wrong?”

“All the time, Henry. What I’m really concerned about here is this capacity for make-believe. Bermuda, Lord deliver us.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Selmon.”

“To what purpose would we go back there?” Selmon said, his habit being to ignore remarks of that sort except to bite back a bit, his voice a model of imperturbable rationality, his intent perhaps actually to provoke. “A little morbid curiosity?”

“Morbid curiosity?
I have to call you on that, Mr. Selmon. I think it’s a despicable word to use.”

Chatham half rose from his chair. His face was a rage of purple.

“Now you listen to me, you superior prig. You call yourself a naval officer. You can’t stand a deck watch. You couldn’t begin to operate fire control. You couldn’t conn one of our small boats. I doubt if you can take a sextant bearing . . .”

“I can count radiation,” Selmon said quietly.

For a moment the CSO seemed about to leap across the table on Selmon. My hand hit the table, sending a jangling of saucers down the length of the table.

“Knock it off.
Gentlemen,” I said more gently.

Everyone had a shorter fuse these days, and it seemed to grow shorter by the day. I waited now for the temperature to lower; listened to another voice: that of the sea beginning to assert itself, accompanied by distant thunder advancing. One waited, in all patience, one tried to penetrate the meanings of sentences, of murmured sounds; of words; of silences . . . It was the reports furnished us by the Russian submarine commander that had fissured, if only to a limited degree, our unspoken pact not to talk about what had happened, not to dwell on it; fearful that once we entered that darkness it would swallow us up, destroy in time, possibly sooner than later, the mental and emotional faculties we so nonnegotiably required to see us through; feeling now we could at least probe the edges of it; more than that, now needing to do so, always with restraint, in order to make the decisions on which time was running out. I knew there were questions waiting to be asked around that table, knew their nature. I dreaded them as much as did the questioners themselves, yet knew they had to ask them before they could even hope to think of where their own views would come down. I made way for it.

“Anyone,” I said. “Feel free to ask . . . anything . . .”

And so they began, as one knew they would, to inquire about their own hometowns, as if received knowledge might affect their personal preferences as to returning.

“Tulsa.” It was young Jennings. “Mr. Selmon, I don’t know why anyone would want to hit Tulsa.”

“Very probably no one did, Mike,” Selmon said.

“But you’re saying . . . Assuming it wasn’t hit . . . everything would be the same? The Galleria . . . Locust Park . . . the university . . . all of it would still be there?” Trailing off on a note half statement, half interrogation. “Just that there would be no people?”

“That’s about the size of it, Mike,” Selmon, who I am sure had never set foot in Tulsa, never heard of its mentioned charms, said gently. “Assuming, as you say, it didn’t rate a missile.” He hesitated, continued in uncharacteristically compassionate tones with the young officer, little more than a boy. “There may still be a few people—well, wandering around, scratching out.”

“Just waiting for it? Waiting to die.”

“Pretty much that,” Selmon said softly. “People have different tolerances to radiation sickness. Not that it makes any difference in the end.”

“Then I’d just as soon not see it. I don’t want to see Tulsa,” Jennings said almost fiercely.

We waited a moment, caught in that. “I’d say the luckiest ones were those with the lowest tolerances,” Lieutenant Thurlow said reflectively.

“If I had a choice,” Selmon said, “that would be mine in that situation.”

“Of course, the luckiest ones of all,” the navigator said, “were those smart enough to die immediately.”

Some of those who came from great cities or from obvious targets hardly bothered to ask any questions at all. Ensign Martin, our assistant communications officer—her home was New York City—didn’t say a word. Nor did Lieutenant Commander Coles, our operations officer, whose home was Norfolk; Lieutenant Polk, our weapons combat officer, who lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It was as though they had with great effort, at immense cost in pain, erected walls around themselves and were not to be fooled or tricked into dropping these expert fortifications for no purpose at all save to let insufferable pain in. But most of our officers were from more distant places, from the small towns of America. As the exchanges went on, it became evident that a higher measure of hope resided in these. Selmon did little to encourage them. The principal difference in the large cities and the small towns appeared to be that those in the former went instantly for the most part while those in the smaller ones were able to hold on until the fallout from the larger cities had reached them. Almost a philosophical question arose as to which were the more fortunate. Still, everyone seemed anxious to make a case for his own town.

“I’m sure everyone here has been made aware of the special glories of Big Spring, Texas,” Lieutenant (jg) Rollins said. “I’ve tried earnestly to do that. What would you say . . .”

The deck officer’s voice also trailed off. “Houston would have been a certain target,” Selmon said quietly. “NASA.”

“Big Spring’s four hundred miles away,” Rollins said, voice low, almost hopeful.

“Karen, I’m afraid that’s as much as next door with that fallout. We’ve seen with our own eyes an almost analogous situation. For Houston, read Naples. For Big Spring, read Amalfi. Went sometime back, I’m afraid. Texas: caught between the massive fallout from Houston in the eastern part of the state and from another certain target in the western part, Amarillo—all our nuclear devices were assembled there. Texas may have been the first state to go in entirety. In fact, that projection was made years ago in some of the internal studies. No one ever said much to the Texans about it that I can recall. The odd thing about it was that at that very time people were talking about getting away from the crowded eastern states, the big cities, to have a better chance—and some doing just that. Moving to places like Texas.”

“I get the picture,” Rollins said shortly, not wanting to hear more. “A big joke on Texas, wasn’t it?”

This went on for a while. The names of different states, different towns, cities, the names of home. Time seemed to stop as the names, some familiar, some not, fell around the table, a sense of nostalgia curiously combining all the antitheses, of affection and horror, of resignation and refusal to recognize what had happened, of acceptance and of denial of belief. The names falling hauntingly, cruelly, into the air, time forgotten, time remembered, while Selmon, with a gentleness and patience I had never seen in him, made his estimates, guesses, at the fate of each. It did not go along without his being challenged.

“You’re not saying that everybody in the country is gone, are you, Mr. Selmon?” Lieutenant Bartlett pressed him.

“No, sir,” Selmon said, his voice taking on more of his customary firmer tone. “I’ve never said that. I would be extremely surprised if that is the case.” But he was not to be budged from his central holding. “What I am saying
is
this: that that is true for the great majority of the population; that most of those remaining are in varying conditions, all on the downside—exactly the same kind of variations we saw at Amalfi, all along the northern Mediterranean beaches, in other words beyond any help; and that the smallest segment of all
is
pretty much untouched up to this point, at least so far, may or may not remain unaffected—putting figures to it, this last group to be counted in the thousands at the most. That is the evidence.”

“In the
thousands?
For the whole country?”

“In the thousands. And I personally wouldn’t guarantee that figure.”

Then Lieutenant Girard spoke up, her voice tranquil as ever yet seeming firmer than usual from one who generally knew her own mind.

“Mike’s right. I don’t
want
to see what it’s like there. Those people on the beaches at Amalfi . . . I don’t want to see them . . . in North Carolina . . . in Massachusetts . . . There are some things it is better not to see.”

“Nonsense.”

Startled, we looked down the table at the CSO. “We’re all missing the point.”

Lieutenant Commander Chatham spoke coldly, brutally, forcefully. “It’s not a question of what we
want
to see. It’s a question of needing to know. I mean absolutely know, the only way you can. We’ll never be satisfied if we don’t have a firsthand look. We could never live with ourselves.”

I saw it at once as an immensely cogent and appropriate argument, its strength felt immediately, bringing us all still. The next I found less so.

“It’s what the crew wants,” he said.

“The
crew,
Mr. Chatham?” Myself now feeling a flash of anger, my voice taking on its first edge; anger and alarm. “I hadn’t realized you’ve been polling the crew.”

He seemed at least a trifle abashed. “Not polling, sir. It’s a sense I have.”

“A
sense,
Mr. Chatham? I also was unaware that you had taken to testing the
sense
of the crew.” That warning in my voice, I decided not to pursue this little clash. “Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not discussing what the crew
wants.
We’re discussing what’s right for this ship to do.”

“Then, Captain, only one course is. This ship has a responsibility to go find out. She has a duty to do so.”

It was as if I were playing directly into his hands.

We waited in the merciless silence, in mute anguish at these thoughts of home, now first articulated, men torn, it seemed to me, as much as men could be, pulled two ways by forces each of which was so powerful that every soul around that table seemed in danger of being rended bodily apart. I turned then, no avoiding it, turned as always I must, as I was forever seeming to do, to Melville, the engineering officer, who had sat throughout silent as a shadow, letting the emotion play around him, taking no part, not even mentioning or inquiring about his own hometown of Charleston, refusing to move out of the one realm that was his, in which he kept himself isolated; waiting for us to come back to it, as he knew in the end we must; asked him and received the latest figures on our fuel reserves, depleted somewhat from the last calculations by our reconnoitering of the north African littoral. Inherent in all projections emergency reserve plus search time in the Pacific.

“Assuming straight home and back this time. Just to look. No reconnoitering.” I felt a certain desperation in my voice. “There and back—to right here. Total cruising time?”

The words had seemed to come from myself with a volition all their own; words I had not wanted to speak; felt immediately I should not have, their only effect to raise false hope, to leave the door open a crack. Chatham’s words stabbing my mind:
Responsibility. Duty.
Words sacred to a ship and to any sea captain. A flash of surprise crossed Melville’s face which never showed surprise; from the “there and back” obviously. Then the quick comprehension: We could not traverse Cape Horn, a matter previously settled. Slowly his head rose from his clipboard; his large brown eyes with so much white in them looking dead-on into mine.