The Caine Mutiny (48 page)

“Yes,” answered Keefer, “I’m scared.”

The exec shrugged, and puffed out his cheeks. “You should have said so sooner. I can understand getting scared- Well, let’s call away the gig.” He started to walk forward.

“I would like you to admit,” said the novelist, hurrying to his side, “that at this point the wise and logical reaction is to get intelligently scared. Sometimes getting scared and beating it the hell away is the correct solution of a-”

“Okay, Tom. Let it go at that.”

“We started out to do a rash and disastrous thing. We backed off in time. There’s nothing wrong with that. We should be glad of it-”

“Don’t say ‘we.’ I’m still ready to go through with it-”

“Well, Christ,” Keefer said angrily, “go ahead and hang yourself, then.”

“I can’t do the thing alone.”

“That’s a stall. You’ve been pulling it right along. I’m frank enough to admit I’m scared, that’s the difference between us-”

Maryk stopped walking. He said mildly, “Listen, Tom. All this was your idea from the start. I never knew the word ‘paranoia’ until you pulled it on me. I’m still not sure what the hell it means. But I think now you’re probably right about the skipper going sick in the head. I think it’s wrong for us to keep quiet about it. Your trouble is, you want to back down when the going looks tough, and you also want me to congratulate you for doing it. You can’t have it both ways, Tom. That’s like Queeg.”

Keefer bit his lower lip and said with a twisted smile, “Them’s harsh words-”

“I see the gig,” said Maryk, going to the rail and semaphoring with both arms. “Let’s get back to the
Caine
.”

CHAPTER 29

The Typhoon

Giant after giant after giant, the new battleships and carriers were ranked in Ulithi Lagoon, an orderly multitude of floating iron skyscrapers, incongruously bordered by a delicate ring of palm trees. The Navy had gathered its main striking power in the atoll for the assault on Luzon; and it was the most formidable sea force that the planet has ever borne. Willie Keith sat for hours on the forecastle of the runty, rusty
Caine
, printing the marvel of this task force on his memory. The array thrilled him, dulled as he was by now to the sights of the war. All the brute energy of human history seemed to him to be concentrated and made visible in Ulithi. He remembered walking along Riverside Drive in peacetime when the fleet was in, and philosophizing-it was during his sophomore year-to the effect that warships were merely big toys, and that national minds were child’s minds, so that nations judged each other by the number and size of each other’s toys. Since then he had seen the toys in action, settling the issues of life and death, and freedom and slavery, for his time; and he had swung so far away from his undergraduate wisdom that he now regarded the Navy’s big ships with reverent awe.

And in so regarding them, he was still only an older sort of sophomore; because what was Ulithi, after all? A tiny enclosure of coral in the empty, empty ocean. A ship sailing within ten miles of it wouldn’t even have seen it; and all the great Third Fleet, sinking at once, would not have raised the level of the sea by a thousandth of the breadth of a hair. The world’s arena remains, to this hour, somewhat too big for the most ambitious human contrivances. The fact is, a typhoon, just one little racing whirlpool of air in one insignificant corner of the ocean, can be too big.

Maryk was in the charthouse, plotting typhoon warnings on the large Pacific chart from a file of despatches giving latitudes and longitudes of storm centers. Willie wandered in and stood looking over his shoulder. “Steve, d’you suppose I could sort of assistant-navigate one of these days?”

“Hell, yes.” Maryk at once -handed over the dividers and parallel rulers. “You can start right now plotting these storm positions.”

“Thanks.” Willie began pricking in the locations neatly, marking them with little red squares.

“When we go out this morning you shoot the sun lines,” said the exec. “Engstrand will punch the stop watch. If we don’t make it back by nightfall you can work out star sights and check your posit against mine.”

“Okay. I’ve shot a few sun lines, last couple of weeks, just for the fun of it.”

“Willie, you’re asking for trouble.” The exec grinned. “Don’t you have enough collateral duties?”

“Oh, sure. But the old man will just keep me decoding till I rot. Laundry and morale and ship’s service are all very well, but-ocean’s crawling with typhoons.”

“Well, this time of year-”

Maryk lit a cigar and went out on the wing. He leaned his elbows on the bulwark, enjoying the contentment of unexpected relief from a trivial chore. He knew Willie Keith would plot the warnings reliably. The pressure from below of a junior officer soberly reaching for more responsibility gave the executive officer a pleasant sense of the fruitfulness of time. He remembered Willie as he had been in his first days on the
Caine
, a baby-faced, flip ensign, callow and careless, pouting at Captain de Vriess like a spanked child. “De Vriess had Willie’s number, though,” Maryk thought. “He told me right off he would be okay after his behind had been kicked bloody.”

Willie appeared beside him. “All plotted.”

“Very well.” Maryk puffed at his cigar.

The communications officer leaned on the bulwark, looking out at the anchorage. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” he said. “I never get tired of looking at it. That’s
power
.”

Next morning the big ships steamed out to sea. The
Caine
tagged along, dragging its target, and for a merry day and night the Third Fleet, division by division, took turns at gunfire practice while advancing westward. Then the minesweeper turned back with its tattered burden, and the task force went on to strike at the airfields of the Philippines. Ulithi looked deserted and shabby when the
Caine
returned; a reviewing stand after the parade, a ballroom after the ball. Only the service ships were left-oilers, minesweepers, and some concrete supply barges, and the ever-present ugly landing craft. Jellyfish were battening on the drifting garbage of the great ships that were gone.

Down splashed the anchor, and dull days went by, while Willie followed the exploits of Halsey’s force in the Fox schedule despatches. His only other diversion was keeping up the typhoon chart.

Willie had been in some of the dirty weather which swirls around the edges of typhoons, but he had never steamed through one. His picture of these whirlwinds was therefore a mingling of half-remembered pages of Conrad and some recently studied sections of the
American Practical Navigator
. On the one hand he retained the immortal image of the squeaking Chinese passengers rolling from one end of a black hold to another in a single fluid lump, accompanied by loose bouncing, clinking silver dollars. On the other hand he knew that typhoons started as a result of a collision of warm air and cold air: the warm air rose like a bubble in a tub, the cold air rushed into the resulting void, a twist was imparted to the path of the cold air by the earth’s rotation, and so you had a rotating windstorm. He wasn’t exactly sure why they rotated in opposite directions north and south of the equator; nor why they mostly happened in the fall; nor why they moved northwest in a parabolic path. But he had noticed that the account in the
American Practical Navigator
closed with an apologetic muttering to the effect that certain aspects of typhoons had never been satisfactorily explained. This gave him an excuse not to bother his head about the scientific account too much. He memorized the methods for locating the direction and distance of the center, and the rules of seamanship for the left and right semicircles; and these he puzzled through until he saw the logic of them. Thereafter he considered himself an informed mariner on the subject.

He knew, in fact, almost as much as one can know about typhoons without having been through one. It was as much as an innocent divinity student, feeling obliged to learn something about sin in order to fight it, might find out by reading
Ulysses
and the poems of Baudelaire.

The monotony was broken by an action despatch flashed to the
Caine
one afternoon from the beach: not a target-towing order, but a screening assignment with tankers which were to rendezvous with the Third Fleet for refueling at sea. The prospect of quasi-combat service stirred up some gaiety in the languid crew. The officers, too, perked up. They indulged in hideous part-singing that night after dinner, concluding with the sailors’ hymn, Eternal Father, Strong to Save; wherein especially cacophonous harmonies were bawled on the last lines,

“O hear us when we cry to Thee

For those in peril on the sea.”

The ocean was calm, the sky clear, and the sun bright when the tanker group stood out from Mugai Channel. The
Caine
’s station was at the extreme right of the screen, five thousand yards from the guide. The zigzag plan was an old familiar one. The squat fat tankers plowed placidly along, and the destroyers rolled in the van, probing under the sea with long fingers of sound. The patterns and precautions of war were as customary to the seafarers of this task group as fireside habits. It was a voyage of sleepy dullness.

Willie Keith’s typhoon chart was empty of red squares in all the blue space between Ulithi and the Philippines. He assumed, therefore, that there were in fact no typhoons in those waters, and went about his chores in quietness of spirit. However, as Captain Queeg had often pointed out, you can’t assume a goddamn thing in the Navy. Not, at least, where typhoons are concerned.

On the night of December 16 the
Caine
began to roll pretty hard. There was nothing unusual in that. Willie had often clung swaying to a stanchion while the inclinometer on the bridge dipped to forty-five degrees, and green white-capped seas filled the view through the side windows. He was reading
The Old Curiosity Shop
in his room. After a while he felt the slight headache that preceded nausea when he read in too-rough weather. He wedged the book into a shelf and went to bed; bracing his body with knees and soles so that the motion hardly disturbed him.

He was shaken out of sleep by the boatswain’s mate. As always, his eyes sought his watch. “What the hell-it’s only two-thirty-”

“Captain wants to see you on the bridge, sir.”

This was slightly strange. Not the summons; Queeg called Willie out of his sleep two or three nights each week to discuss some point of accounting or decoding; but as a rule he was in his cabin. Hanging onto the upper bunk with one hand as he pulled on trousers, Willie sleepily reviewed in his mind the accounts he had recently audited. He decided that the laundry statement was probably at issue this time. He staggered topside, wondering whether the rolling was really as steep as it seemed. The wind, wet and warm, was on the starboard quarter, stiff enough to be whining through the life lines and guy wires. Black ragged seas climbed toward the sky with each roll. There were no stars.

Harding said, “He’s in the charthouse.”

“Condition Bligh?”

“Not really. Convulsion second class.”

“Well, good- Rolling a bit.”

“A bit.”

The red light flashing up in the charthouse as Willie shut the door showed Queeg and Maryk bent over the desk, both in their underwear. The captain glanced sideways, closing one eye, and said, “Willie, you’ve been keeping this typhoon chart, hey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, since Mr. Maryk has been unable to explain satisfactorily why such a serious responsibility was delegated without my permission or approval, I suppose you have no explanation, either?”

“Sir, I figured that anything I did to improve my professional competence would be very welcome.”

“Well, you’re quite right there, it certainly can stand improving-but-well, then, why are you making such a botch of it, hey?”

“Sir?”

“Sir, my foot! Where’s any typhoon warnings between the Philippines and Ulithi? You mean to tell me there aren’t any, this time of year?”

“No, sir. It’s unusual, I know, but the area’s all clear-”

“
Unless
your radio gang has fouled up some call sign or doped off copying some storm warning or it got lost in your efficient files instead of being decoded and plotted on this chart-”

“I don’t think that’s happened, sir-”

Queeg made the chart rattle, tapping it with his forefinger. “Well, the barometer’s dropped fourteen points tonight and the wind’s shifting every couple of hours to the right and it’s force seven right now. I want you to double-check the skeds for the last forty-eight hours, and I want all storm warnings broken instantly and brought to me, and hereafter Mr. Maryk will keep the typhoon chart.”

“Aye aye, sir.” A sudden sharp roll threw Willie off balance and he fell against Queeg. The feel of the captain’s dank naked skin was horrid to him. He jumped away. “Sorry, sir.”

“Kay. Get going.”

Willie went to the radio shack, checked through the Fox schedules, and found nothing. He drank coffee with the bleary, white-faced operators and left, glad to escape from the nightmarish beep-beeps. He had hardly dozed off in his bunk when the same radioman who had brought the coffee shook him awake. “Storm warning, sir. All ships from CincPoa. Just came in.”

Willie decoded the message and brought it up to the charthouse. Queeg was lying in the bunk, smoking. Maryk perched on the stool, his head resting on his arms on the desk.

“Ah, found something, did you? I thought so.” The captain took the message and read it.

“Sir, I didn’t find it in any back skeds. It came in ten minutes ago-”

“I see. Just another one of those funny coincidences that dot your career, Willie, hey? Well, I’m glad I got you to check, anyway, although of course it just came in. Plot it, Steve.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The exec studied the penciled slip and picked up his dividers. “That might be it, sir. East and south of us-three hundred miles- Let’s see. Three hundred seventeen, exactly- They call it a mild circular disturbance, though-”

“Well, fine. The milder the better.”

“Sir,” said Willie, “if you think I’m lying about that despatch you can check in the radio shack-”

“Why, Willie, who’s accusing anybody of lying?” The captain smiled slyly, his face lined with black wrinkles in the red light, and puffed on his cigarette. The glowing end was queerly whitish.

“Sir, when you say a funny coincidence-”

“Ah, ah, Willie, don’t go reading meeen-ings,” sang the captain. “That’s the sure sign of a guilty conscience. You can go now.”

Willie felt the all-familiar knotted sickness in his stomach and pounding of the heart. “Aye aye, sir.” He went out on the wing and stood where the fresh air could blow in his face. When the ship rolled to port his chest pressed on the bulwark until he seemed to be lying on a metal projection looking down into the sea. The next moment he had to cling to the bulwark to keep from toppling backward. He felt his hands trembling on the dank, slippery edge of the bulwark. He stayed on the bridge, snuffing the wind and staring out over the heaving, choppy sea until Paynter came up to relieve the deck. Then he went below with Harding, and the two officers drank coffee standing up in the dark wardroom, each with an elbow hooked around a stanchion. A small red glow came from the heating grill of the Silex.