The Last Ship (65 page)

“It was.” I was astonished at the exactitude with which she was into my mind. “Let’s start it as soon as the settlement is finished. But in a very controlled fashion: to conserve paper. We’ll go into it up the line. Do it in the main hall. Couple hours a day of men off duty. Noisy on carpentry, Silva on fishing, Thurlow on celestial navigation, yourself on literature . . . Get it all down. Sheets rationed very carefully. Taken back after that two hours.”

“Will do, sir. I’ll set up a plan . . . Excuse all these diversions, sir.”

“They’re not that. They’re . . . they couldn’t be more important. Having those books, those tapes . . . those blank sheets of paper.” Her own excitement reflected in myself.

“Aye, sir. They couldn’t be more important. Now then . . .”

Absently her fingers moved over the envelope in her lap.

 *  *  * 

There was a touch of what I have already made reference to: that she had become captain and I the subordinate sitting across from her and awaiting her wishes, her orders, her commands. No change in her demeanor to suggest this—perhaps a certain added firmness in her tone, a detectable sense of authority, of being in control of the direction the conversation took, these but marginally increased from what had always been her self-confident manner. There was no insubordination. If anything she seemed to “sir” and “Captain” me more than usual. But I felt the vibrations of power, of prerogative, as if coming off her, reflected from her very skin. Having expected a direct proceeding now to the presumably decided question of the women, to the envelope still in her lap (I could scarcely keep my eyes off it), I was surprised at the turn she now took.

“Captain, I would like to discuss with you the question of the governance.”

“The governance? Why, it’s settled. Ship’s company will decide as to that. When the settlement is completed. As promised by me.”

“I know about the promise, sir. May I speak?”

I shrugged at the rhetorical question and she began, seeming to me to proceed with a quiet carefulness, scrupulousness, that was unusually intensified even in her, whose habit this was.

“Something’s started again with the crew: men with thoughts aimed at home. Bigelow”—a missile technician—“asked Ears the other day to send a message to one of his children on her birthday. Started . . . then stopped. Shook his head. He cried a little. Now and then a number cry a little.”

“I would assume that. I have cried a little myself.”

“Jorgans”—a machinist’s mate—“has started writing a letter once a week to his wife; delivers it to Talley as postal clerk when we had one—she takes it, just as she used to do. A number are beginning to speak of back there in the present tense again . . . their home towns, their families. You can walk around the island and see a man here and there just sitting on the cliffside looking across the sea to where it is, or was . . .”

“I don’t consider these—manifestations—anything other than what one would expect.”

“As to whether they’re—resigned—to spending the rest of their lives here . . . I don’t believe they consciously have faced up to that possibility—very few of them. They’re putting that thought off.”

“Yes, I sense that. Perfectly natural. Even favorable. So we can get on with what has to be done. The Farm. Building the settlement. By the way.” I spoke with a certain asperity. “As to ‘possibility.’ ‘Certainty’ would be a nearer word. I would hope most of them are beginning to understand that.”

I waited with some impatience: She seemed to me to be speaking of obvious phenomena, of a kind I myself well knew; the impatience restrained by the knowledge that she was an officer who never wasted time, invariably there being a purpose, most often an important even crucial one, in her procedures. She began then to speak in that slightly educatory tone she had at such moments, much familiar to me from our countless discussions of morale matters, of how the men were doing, speaking quietly but with that concentrating directness I recognized when she felt an issue was at hand of a troubling, perhaps even dangerous nature if let alone, time to head it off.

“Captain, I have to say this. I don’t think many of them have reached your degree of finality—acceptance, certainty, as you put it—that they will never leave this island. However, I would also say . . . they’re slowly getting there, most of them. Seeing these very permanent looking buildings go up, for one thing. I think given time most of them will come around; accept the island—as their home.” She seemed to be framing her words to convey some critical exactness. “Except for a certain number. I’m not entirely sure those will ever come to terms with the island.”

Again, I did not consider what she said in any way unusual; could not understand the anxiousness she obviously felt.

“I would expect it to take a rather long time for some,” I said idly. “Perhaps the rest of their lives for a few.”

“But in that number I’m speaking about—well, the thoughts are very much alive. Not working toward coming to terms with the island. Working toward: well, going home.”

Somehow the phrase instantly irritated me. “Going home? Still? My God.” I could feel myself giving a decidedly brutal note to the word. “What home? I thought that was settled. That God-awful time when Chatham and his people cast off in those boats in the Mediterranean. These people you’re talking about now. They were given the chance to leave. They chose to stay with the ship.”

“Men have second thoughts, Captain,” she said, mildly, but almost instructionally. “Some wish now they had gone in the boats.”

I came down from it. I shrugged as though we were dealing with an emotional rather than a realistic matter; a distorted state of mind of a few men given to imaginings, changeable in time perhaps, in any case not to be acted upon by those afflicted with it; objects of pity, solicitousness—and of help—these poor souls should be, certainly not of anger in their world of almost eerie fantasy: we had not come close to picking up anything; even those vastly puzzling Bosworth signals long since ceased, seas back; all of this, along with all that other mountain of validations, to any mind which had not entirely abandoned rationality certifying as would a coroner’s certificate the death of the place she had just spoken of as home. Long since my mind had turned inflexible on the subject. Inwardly having much less tolerance than at one time with views so opposite to the overwhelming evidence, I nevertheless spoke quietly, considerately, even compassionately, as though dealing with the irrational; in it, however, a captain’s unmistakable tone, of matters now become nonnegotiable; in fact, nondiscussable; of matters he had had enough of.

“You’re doubtless right, Miss Girard. Men change their minds. And once they do . . . I suppose we should resign ourselves to the fact that there are always bound to be a few nothing will ever convince—short of our getting back on the ship, casting off, taking that course we’re not going to take, can’t take; and never will—long since decided, that matter. So long as they don’t make actual trouble . . .” I could hear my voice adamant . . . “I’ll leave them alone; with their illusions; I understand them; I even understand what they feel. Men have a right to illusions, especially those. But as to any serious consideration of that foolishness, madness. I’m not prepared to go into that affair again. It’s finished. It was settled off Suez. Going home, as they put it. As they fully understood. That the choice not to go back was for once and all.” I spoke rather sharply. “I take it you remember that was made clear to the last hand, Miss Girard.”

“Indeed I do, sir. And have reminded of it those hands we’re talking about.”

I sighed, backed off again. “But I’ll let them be. They seem harmless enough. Aberrants.”

I could feel her compulsion to say more; a certain familiar determination hovering around her mouth. I had run out of time as to this subject. I wanted an end to it.

“All right, Lieutenant,” I said shortly. “Let’s have it.”

“I’m not sure they’re all that harmless, sir. If I may put the matter directly, I think you may underrate their tenacity, their sense of purpose.”

It was as though she were giving me a lesson in the dangers of naïveté; even in basic logic. She continued as if to set me straight, indeed herself speaking rather trenchantly.

“I believe it’s also wise to remember, sir, that they don’t consider themselves—this group of men I’m talking about—either foolish or mad or even aberrant; nor present the behavior of such men; indeed, quite the opposite; and that this present equanimity is not any final guarantee that they’ll remain forever passively content with—their illusions. They’re in dead earnest. I would put it this way: They’re biding their time.”

The phrase, coming from the least of alarmists, felt suddenly threatening in the hushed air; to no one more so than a ship’s captain who had gone through the business of rebellious men, was absolutely determined beyond anything else not to let any possible vestige of a similar uprising get a start, the mistake he had made once. It was not one any ship’s captain was likely to make twice.

“Biding their time?” My voice abruptly taking on the tones of a sea captain confronted with unallowable behavior.

“If the governance should change. Majority rule. Believing then that they might change the minds of the others. The matter actually brought to a vote. Sir, I think they’re waiting for the question of the governance to come up.”

“But not to stay on the island—what other choice is there?”

“There is that.”

She looked down at the ship. Something froze in me. I was afraid to speak. I looked out at the waters, down myself at the ship. Asked, almost off-handedly. “They would take the ship? How many men are we talking about, Lieutenant?”

“Twenty at least. As high as twice that.”

I said it factually: “Forty out of one hundred and seventy-eight.” I looked across at her. “I now appreciate your concern, Miss Girard.”

I waited a moment. “I have a question which may strike you as curious.”

“I am here to answer all questions, sir.”

“I am glad to hear it.” I looked straight into her eyes. “This one is, among those wishing to go back, are there any women?”

She looked me straight back. I thought I saw a flash of something like amusement in her eyes; it could have been something quite different.

“Negative, sir. Not a single one.”

She immediately picked up: “I’ve often wondered if it was wise, sir.” Her own voice altering slightly to take on that tone of persuasion I also knew as a sign of having herself reached a strongly held conviction on some matter she considered urgent, now the time to go to bat for it using all her finely honed talents in such circumstances. “More than ever I find myself coming to the determination that the Navy way is still the best for everyone. In fact, the necessary way. At least for some time to come. Certainly that it’s too early for any change.”

“It’s not a question of whether the Navy way is still the best way, Miss Girard. The point is that they have to be given the choice. For the men to be ruled now in any manner other than one they choose themselves . . . I can think of no greater incentive to trouble.” I shrugged. “Who knows? They’re Navy men. They may choose the Navy way themselves.”

“With all respect, sir, I don’t think we can afford the risk that they will choose something else. Not yet . . .” Her voice seeming to bear in on me, a tone admonitory in it, almost a lecturing quality. She looked at me dead on. “I have to put it straight to you, Captain.”

“Please do so.”

Her words came at me, hard and clean-cut, bent now on convincement.

“I don’t think you have the right just to give it up like that. If that time is to come, it’s not here now. In fact the time could not be worse. I think it’s your duty to
want
to continue in the old way, the Navy way, the way they’re used to.”

Suddenly I gave myself a lapse I would have thought I would never have permitted myself.

“I’m not running for office, Miss Girard.”

At once I felt a sense of self-revulsion; felt I was soliciting, almost begging for fealty, for flattery; almost that she, seeing so, was slyly supplying these things. Felt a sense of falseness in the air.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Miss Girard. I like being a ship’s captain. Commanding, yes, ruling the men, my word final; yes, I like that. I’m less certain that I have any desire to be monarch of this island.”

I should have stopped there. Instead, like some abject politician, overcome by his own self-importance, his sure sense of his indispensability, that men could hardly get along without him, preying avariciously on anything that would feed this feeling, I proceeded.

“Those who want to go home,” I said. It was as if I were seeking some excuse, some justification, somehow to reverse my position, hold on to my captain’s sovereignty. “What would they do if they achieved power? Seize the ship? Cast off—for home?”

“I don’t think they’re that rash. Or even for other reasons that they would actually do it. Not abandon their shipmates to the island. No.” She waited, again seeming to search for precision, to come as near as possible to exactly what she felt would happen. “Something like this: They would work—the word might be proselytize—to make their opinion the majority one. Then I think they might say to the others: ‘We’re taking the ship home. That is what most of ship’s company now wants to do. You may remain on the island—or you may come with us. It’s your choice.’ They would be at least that fair.”

The very word in that context made me angry, the mockery of it.

“Some fairness. Considering what they’d be taking them into.”

“Remember that they—the ones I’m talking about—believe differently as to that. They think they would find something back there. Some place that would take them in—be habitable. And there is the fuel to go there. They all know it.”

“Fuel.” I spoke brutally. “The ship: we would need her for our very lives—if ever we should be forced out of here, have to find another place. If radiation hits this island. Not likely now, Selmon says. But still in the realm of possibility. They must know that. We would be trapped. Those who remain. They would place those in the most mortal danger.” I turned to her, feeling utter calm. “Simply this. It will not be allowed.”