Cold is the Sea (4 page)

Laura had the same reaction. “He's a good friend of yours, and he was just blowing off some frustration. He's not really afraid of Scott holding anything against him, either, and you've been hearing about the corn in Iowa ever since you've known him. But he did clear up one thing. None of the reasons Brighting gave for turning you down are the real ones. It was entirely Admiral Scott's call. That triggered something. I think Brighting doesn't want anyone as good as you, and as senior, around him. Didn't he say something about you possibly having to retire in a few years?”

Rich admitted that he had.

“How old is Brighting? When do admirals have to retire?”

“When they're sixty-two, though special ones can be kept on to sixty-four. He's got three or four more years, I guess,” Rich said.

“Maybe it's his own approaching retirement that's bugging him. Is there anybody he might be building up to succeed him that you might be getting in the way of?”

“Nobody,” Richardson said. “There were a few earlier in the program, in fact some friends of mine, but they've all left. Some of them weren't too happy about the deal they had.”

“Well, then, my guess is that your being taken in might set up a new potential successor, and he doesn't want there to be any successor. He's already gotten rid of the others. Why set up another one?”

“But that's crazy, Laura. All military organizations provide for a succession to command. Whether it's engineering or operations, there's got to be someone to take over if and when the boss
falls out, for whatever reason. It's a principle, a basic one. He knows that.”

“Of course he knows it, darling. But since when has Admiral Brighting gone by the rules of any system except his own? You've had a great record in the Navy. People look up to you. They know you always do a top job on everything, and are fair and considerate besides, which he isn't. He's simply afraid that once you're in his business, you'll be the heir apparent. He doesn't want there to be an heir apparent. I think that's perfectly obvious. He wants to be the one indispensable man. When he finally leaves, he wants people to say there was nobody who could take his place.”

“Nobody could ever be a rival, or a successor, to Brighting. That ought to be obvious to him and everybody else. He's been in that business for so many years already that nobody will ever fill his shoes. But maybe Scott's phone call got him to thinking I was part of a Bureau of Personnel plot of some kind.”

“That's what I'm saying. Taking you off the list was a way of getting back at Scott, showing him up. He thinks you were a full-fledged member of the scheme. That's one reason he treated you the way he did. Another thing, Brighting must have looked up your record too, and found out you're not the sort of person he would be able to push around easily.”

“You're just being a loyal wife now. How can he not be able to push me around if Admiral Scott, who is a much nicer guy, seems to be able to do it so easily? He thinks I'm a patsy for Scott—”

“Don't be silly. Brighting has been pushing juniors around all his life, and lately seniors as well. That's something he's an expert at. Part of his game is to block in advance all those he might have trouble dominating. Another part of it is to hit at one through another.” Laura smiled enigmatically. “But he hasn't really run into you yet, my darling.”

“There's not much chance he will, either,” Richardson said morosely.

“If only there were someone on Brighting's staff who could get the word to him that you hadn't anything to do with any scheme BuPers—isn't that what you call Admiral Scott's office—might have cooked up.”

“Scott is the Chief of Naval Personnel, and BuPers is the
shorthand word for his whole bureau of a couple of thousand people. . . .”

Laura knew the superfluous explanation was really her husband's device to let him think over what she had just said. She ignored it. “You must know someone over there among all those people. You must have been with some of them, men or women, somewhere. A lot of them are submariners. During the war, maybe?” The strange expression was still around Laura's mouth.

A thought was growing in Richardson's mind. Joan had been moving in Navy circles ever since the war. It was totally possible, even likely, that Laura and Joan had met somewhere. Although he had never discussed her with Laura, more than once over the years of their marriage he had wondered if Laura knew of his wartime affair with Joan. It was even possible she had heard of Joan's early relationship with Jim Bledsoe, Laura's first husband—for so tragically brief a time. Recognizing the possibility made it harden into probability. Laura and Joan might certainly have known of each other, might even have met somewhere. If so, they had doubtlessly been fencing, each uncertain how much the other knew.

Joan had been very much in his life, at a critical time. Laura
must
know, or have shrewdly guessed, already. But, womanlike, she must have it from him. He had already denied Joan once, would not a second time. He could not, however, tell what he knew, or surmised, about her and Jim. That was not his secret. Nor need he distress Laura with any details of his own relationship (that word, again!) with Joan. Yet he would have to tell her something. That was clear.

“I do know someone over there, though there's nothing she could do. I ran into her by accident when I was over there. It's a WAVE lieutenant, Joan Lastrada. I knew her when she was in the intelligence business in Pearl Harbor, during the war.”

Again that unfathomable ghost of a smile. “Good. Now maybe we're getting somewhere.” (Could that simple statement have had a double meaning?) “How can we get Joan to tell Brighting you had no part in Scott's scheme?”

“We can't, Laura. Nobody has any influence over Admiral Brighting. She's only a lieutenant in his shop. I'm not about to go to her with any such idea!”

“I know you far better than you think, husband mine, and I
wouldn't love you as much if I thought you would. But she might anyway, if she finds out what's been going on. . . .”

Something was going on in Laura's mind, all right. “We're not going to get Joan or anybody else mixed up in this,” he said again, a little too loudly. As he pronounced the authoritative-sounding words, however, he sensed an unusual undercurrent. It was almost something one could touch. There was a fleeting, cryptic look in Laura's eyes, a general abstractedness, an attitude of listening to another tune entirely. For the moment, he had lost her.

The conversation, and the unusual note on which it ended, a note he could never before remember emanating from his wife, remained uppermost in Richardson's mind for days. There were the final details of turning over his office to his relief, the modest good-bye luncheon given by his office mates, finally the Friday morning arrival of a moving van at his house. Even the hectic activity of tearing up the home of three years and seeing it packed into the van, a routine gone through so very many times and yet always traumatic, seemed overshadowed by a quietness of waiting. Something was going on somewhere, out of sight and out of hearing. His sixth sense, whatever that might be, was whirling madly. Laura was no help, nor had she been, although on this moving day, when he asked her point-blank, she admitted to the same intuition. Even Jobie felt it. “It doesn't feel like we're moving to where we're supposed to be moving to,” he announced with thirteen-year-old directness.

Late in the afternoon, the moving van was about to pull away from the empty house when the telephone, now on the floor in an empty hall, sounded its insistent tocsin. “Just a moment for Admiral Brighting,” said a female voice.

There were no communication-establishing formalities. Brighting spoke on the telephone with the same expressionless monotone Richardson had heard in his office. “Richardson, there's a vacancy in the next class at Arco. It starts tomorrow. Do you want it?”

“Yes, sir!” Richardson could say nothing more. The unexpected words rang through his brain. Whatever it was that had changed Brighting's mind, it had indubitably happened. He had won! Euphoria flooded his body.

“You will bring no uniforms with you, and no rank insignia.
You're to wear civilian clothes the entire time you're on the site. There are officers and enlisted men there whom I have put into positions of responsibility, and you're to accept orders from them as though they were from me. At no time are you to use your rank for any purpose whatsoever. I will not have my program and organization disrupted by the requirement of toadying to you by anyone, or for any reason. You will be there for one purpose, and one purpose only: to learn what they can teach you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said Richardson again.

“Be in Idaho Falls tomorrow morning. There is a flight you can catch tonight, and I'll have the plane met on arrival in Idaho.”

Richardson's elation evaporated. Even under wartime pressure, he had known of no case of such peremptory treatment of officer or man. Abandoning Laura and Jobie without warning could not be vital to any training course. Surely he merited more considerate treatment than this! “Admiral,” he began, “the moving van is about to pull away, and our car is packed. We're within an hour of starting to drive to New London. May I have the weekend to get my family safely up there? I can be in Idaho Monday morning—” But Laura was frantically shaking her head and putting both hands over her mouth, as the flat voice cut in.

“Richardson, if you want nuclear power training, you'll be landing at Idaho Falls airport tomorrow morning. An officer as resourceful as you should have no trouble having his orders modified and arranging his personal affairs.” The telephone clicked dead.

Laura was hugging him and kissing him, nearly crying her relief and delight. “Of course I can handle the rest of the move myself,” she said. “Friends will help me if I need them. Jobie and I will repack you a suitcase right now, while you telephone Deacon Jones and get the paperwork started. Then we'll drive you to the airport. Jobie and I won't have any trouble driving through Baltimore to the motel tonight, and we'll roll into New London tomorrow just as planned.”

There was an interval of furious activity. The car had to be partially unloaded and the two largest suitcases packed for a lengthy stay in Idaho. Deacon Jones had to be tracked down by the BuPers duty officer and asked to return to his desk to prepare the new orders. Airline reservations had to be made and tickets
purchased. Admiral Scott's administrative aide had to leave a party and return to the bureau to sign the modification in orders drawn up by Jones. Finally the Richardsons set off in their loaded automobile, not for the road to Baltimore and the motel planned for their overnight stop, but for Washington National Airport.

It was not until hurried good-byes had been said and Rich was strapped in his seat in the airplane that he was able to unwind enough to admit the thoughts which had been knocking at the door of his consciousness for the last hour.

What was it that had caused Admiral Brighting to change his mind? What had happened the last few days? What could lie behind the extraordinary order to leave all rank behind—could this be a reaction against whatever it was that had brought about the reversal?

Foremost of all the confused ideas spinning through Richardson's head was one simple question which, he sensed, might well remain forever unanswered. Could Joan have had a hand in this? He had at least managed to ask Laura this during a moment's breathing space. But Laura's answer was totally unsatisfactory. “What makes you think anyone had anything to do with it? Maybe old man Brighting just had a change of heart.”

All the same, it was the first time, so far as Richardson knew, that Brighting had ever changed his mind, and he wondered.

3

A
dmiral Brighting's empire, carved out of an unlikely combination of Navy, industry and science, was the most complete and efficient Richardson had ever seen. A car met him very early Saturday morning at the Idaho Falls airport and took him immediately to “the site,” as his driver-escort referred to it. The site was nearly one hundred miles away, and the station wagon hurtled along at top speed, accelerator pressed to the floor, over a flat, hard-baked plain which stretched in all directions, as level as the sea, to a horizon any seaman must know was false. The road was obviously built for speed, though only two lanes wide. There was hardly a curve and only a single intersection, and during the entire trip, which took just minutes longer than an hour, they saw only two other cars, both of them headed in the opposite direction.

The road had but a single destination, and it came in sight while still some twenty miles distant, a square white dot poised on the horizon at the base of glowering, slate gray mountains. “That's the prototype, or rather, the building it's in,” said Rich's
companion. “It's six stories high, and most folks can't believe it's that far away.”

At closer range, the dot grew into a graceless, windowless, sand-colored cube, dominating a number of lower buildings of industrial character. A tall chain-link fence surrounded the complex, and a cloud of steam rose from a broad, squat structure alongside the boxlike bulk of the prototype building.

“That's the cooling pond,” said the driver, answering Richardson's question. “We've been critical for three months. There's not much heat going into it right now, though. At full power it steams up a lot more than this.” The speaker, who had introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander John Rhodes, officer-in-charge of the prototype, was a short, dark young man. He had not been talkative during the ride from the airport, and was clearly ill at ease. “Rhodes with E. G. Richardson,” he said to the guard at the gate, and instantly Rich felt he knew at least part of the reason for his discomfiture.