The Last Ship (50 page)

“Quite within the realm of possibility,” Bainbridge put in. “As a matter of fact, when I was stationed in the Pentagon—I suppose I can let the rest of you in on this now,” he said, in a rare witticism for the communications officer, “I was put in a Navy section called PNW—for Post-Nuclear World. The very existence of the damn section was itself so classified that we had a joke about our studies being so top secret as to be stamped ‘Burn Before Reading.’”

Bainbridge received with a smile the small ripple of laughter. “Anyhow, one idea given a very serious consideration was the positioning of something called a ‘Mobile Continuity Force.’ The idea was to create a task force of vessels built solely for the purpose and cram them with all imaginable survival gear and personnel . . . food, clothing, medicine, tents . . . doctors, nurses, mobile hospitals, ambulances . . . grain and vegetable seeds, fertilizers . . . Jeeps, landing craft, helicopters . . . standing ready to take all this to pockets of survivors who might just be around here and there in the United States. Plans even called for each ship’s company being composed half of men, half of women: In case there was nobody left, they could procreate all by themselves. Having built this task force, the idea was to pick the place on earth most likely to survive all-out nuclear attack. There was no argument as to what that place was. The vessels were to be stationed in the South Polar Sea—however great the fallout everywhere else, contamination there being either of low intensity or nonexistent.”

We all listened with fascination to this account of the communications officer’s former duty. I softly put a question into the absolute silence.

“And what happened to that particular Pentagon plan, Mr. Bainbridge?”

“Well, Captain, the Joint Chiefs shot it down. Two reasons. In the event of that kind of attack the whole country, they figured, would be so contaminated that the ships couldn’t get anywhere near it for a couple of hundred years or so. The other was that building and positioning those ships, so they reasoned, would signal to the Russians and everybody else that we believed we could survive a nuclear confrontation; contradicted the reigning philosophy of mutual assured destruction—that a nuclear war was unwinnable. While they were about it, they deep-sixed the whole damned section as being too dangerous just sitting around thinking up things like that and sent us all to sea.”

“At least, Whitney,” Thurlow put in, “there was the favorable result that otherwise we would never have had the pleasure of having you aboard.”

“A very handsome compliment, Mr. Thurlow. I thank you very much.”

We sat for a moment in silent contemplation of these revelations.

“Well, now,” I said. “The South Polar Sea is still there. And so is Antarctica. If those predictions on which that fascinating contingency plan was based of a . . . What did you say that thing was called, Mr. Bainbridge?”

“Mobile Continuity Force, sir.”

“Typical Navy nomenclature. If the predictions of low or noncon-tamination in fact hold . . .”

I paused in this fancy.

“There’s just one drawback,” Thurlow said. “For us personally, I mean. I doubt if men can live on nothing but fish.”

“No, I suppose they couldn’t,” I said vaguely. The mind made a movement. Half the mind went off somewhere, to attend to something, I couldn’t tell what. “I hear it’s pretty cold there, too.”

“Yes, sir. I just felt to mention it—Antarctica. Meantime, that place,” Selmon said, “—assuming that good thing occurs—will have to remain in the hands of those that have it now.”

“Those that have it now, Mr. Selmon?”

“Penguins and sea leopards, sir,” the radiation officer said. “Especially penguins. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They have a good shot—just my opinion—of not being touched at all. To go right on living as if nothing had ever happened. Maybe—except for a few bugs around the earth—the only thing that will. Penguins may very well own the earth; presently if not already. What’s left of it.”

“Penguins and sea leopards,” I said absently, my mind still preoccupied as though trying to identify an elusive object. “Imagine penguins and sea leopards outlasting the whole works. Well, probably they deserve to. Especially penguins. I don’t think they ever hurt anybody.”

“No, sir. They’ll probably wonder—from time to time—why men don’t come around anymore. Gawking at them and taking their pictures. Then they’ll just shrug and go on like always. If penguins shrug.”

All this was decidedly loquacious and nonscientific for Selmon, who generally stuck to the technical facts. His having let go, it seemed to encourage another county to be heard from; with that sanguine and ironic air it had.

“If penguins survive, it’ll mean the new evolution can start that much further along,” the voice said almost cheerfully, as if there was nothing without its bright side. “Instead of with one-cells. Puts everything a few million years further ahead, right? I wonder what’ll evolve from penguins?”

That was Thurlow. “Yes. Well, now. Shall we get off the penguins and back to us?” I said.

 *  *  * 

That night I could not get Antarctica out of my mind. If Selmon’s suppositions fell in . . . A very fat hypothesis to be sure. And yet. Was there some way? Some way, finding it true, we could possibly make it there? I started with known assets. We were a ship, from Barents duty, equipped formidably for cold latitudes, including Navy polar-weather clothing aboard in quantity, much else; not least, a ship’s company deeply experienced in battling frigid zones at the other end of the earth, on one of the coldest of seas. But the Antarctic: That was a quantum step up in frigid zones. The elements would be our foes. No problem otherwise of hostile welcome I could foresee. They would certainly be willing to share it with us if I knew anything about penguins. I remembered once standing in front of a large refrigerated cage containing a half dozen of them at the National Zoological Park in Washington—myself just back, in fact, from picking up my orders at BUPERS for the
James,
happy as a boy at this command; completely certified, all the insistent imprimaturs fulfilled, to command such a ship as I now went to: a qualified mariner; an authenticated noncrazy, nor likely to become one; a couple of hours to kill before the flight down to Mayport, knowing no one in the city, therefore visiting the animals, who didn’t require invitations, couldn’t refuse me. The only time I’d ever seen penguins. Feeding time came. The man entered with a bucket of fish. Instead of hassling him and climbing over each other to get to the fish, the penguins simply arranged themselves in a neat semicircle in front of him, as though taking their places at table, and there waited, each, patiently and quietly, until the man held a fish over its mouth, which then came open and took it, mouth then closing immediately. Presently giving a little yak of a noise which sounded like “Thank you.” No one shoving anybody else or trying to get another’s fish. Manners, politeness, decorum, consideration: all obviously important to them, greed vulgar. I felt you could count on their compassion, their willingness to share. Was there any way at all, if it should come to that, to deal with the frigid temperatures? With the food problems? None occurred. And yet the mind simply wouldn’t let go, give up, on any place that might have conferred on it that sublime distinction of Selmon’s. “It just might be the one place to remain free—now and forever.”

I stuck Antarctica in a corner of my mind.

“S
hipmates,” I said, and told them at once, “you will remember that when I spoke to you in the Strait I told you of our hope that we would find a place in Africa, establish a temporary home, and keep trying to set up communications with America as to some place we might safely land there. Wait it out. I have to tell you now that Africa is not going to take us in.”

I had deliberately brought the ship to rest off Suez. We could just see its mouth in the distance. It was the fairest of days, so windless the ship swung not a degree on her anchor, the fulgent sunlight shining down from an unclouded sky of palest blue upon that intense and darker blue of the Mediterranean, stretching serenely to all horizons, the dying continent lying in the distance astern. A deep peace seemed to pervade the air, the universe, to embrace all in an almost ceremonial stillness. Only the ship broke the vast and plaintive solitude. All of light, of beauty of day; yet, thinking of what I was about to do, it was as though I stood on the shore of a somber and darkling sea. Uncertain as to how they would receive it; aware of the chasm on which I was poised, great peril close as could be to the surface. I looked down across the figures of the men and women of the ship, crowded body to body into the spaces below where I stood on the after missile launcher. They waited totally without sound or movement.

To one thing I had irrevocably made up my mind. It had now become necessary to assault them with the last cruel detail; both as to these new findings on that shore behind me and to those concerning home, the latter to some degree withheld, softened, the last time, in the Strait, when I had mounted the platform of the after missile launcher, as I had just now, and spoken to them. Then, though never dissimulating with them, I had tempered the brutality of giving them in explicit terms what had happened to their homes. Then I had spoken with compassion. Now in its stead a sense of ruthlessness lay upon me. This time they must not fail to understand. I had decided to have three officers address them, and in that order: Girard, to tell them about diminishing food supplies; Melville, the same as to fuel; and finally Selmon, as to conditions there. The first two making it clear to them that we simply had neither the fuel nor the food to do both things: to go home and to try to find a new home in the Pacific; Selmon to acquaint them beyond any possibility of misunderstanding with the evidence that there was little if anything to go home to. Girard and Melville had spoken. Now I said, “Mr. Selmon.”

I had told him beforehand to withhold nothing, either as to America or Africa; to tell them unsparingly, yes, unmercifully. He now proceeded to do so. He stepped up and stood beside me on the platform. He began to talk, the facts seeming the more pitiless for the steady, stolid recitation he made of them, as if being so incontrovertible in their stark deadliness, they needed no tricks of persuasion. First he disposed of Africa, as he had with me, in a few brisk sentences. Then he directed their attention to that other mainland, commenced to take them piece by piece through the last harrowing detail, offering not an ounce of propitiation. He told them that at the very best we might see on the beaches of Massachusetts and Maryland, of Virginia, Florida, people such as we had seen on the beaches of Amalfi, other beaches in our sweep of the European side of the Mediterranean. Did they remember them? Well, the only difference in those at home, those who might still be alive, would be that these would be considerably further gone in both physical and mental deterioration than those unforgotten figures we had viewed there. The portrayal came on relentlessly. Another difference: We had been able to spend an hour or so on the Mediterranean beaches. But now we could not do that on any of the beaches that he had mentioned. Not on Cape Cod or Rehoboth. Not Cape Hatteras or the Carolinas. Not Charleston, our home port. Not Georgia, not Jekyll Island, which many of the men knew from being not far away. From Jacksonville to Key West, not Florida. “Any man who spent five minutes on any of those beaches . . .” He paused and added, “Any woman—could never have children again,” he said as if he wanted a simple illustration to give them an idea, “even if he or she lived.” Then that sort of intellectual shrug that had become so much a part of the radiation officer. “But, of course, at the levels obtaining he would be dead in a week, a few weeks at the outside if he should be so unlucky as to have an exceptionally high tolerance.”

He held back nothing. Having dealt with matters that concerned one of our two options as to course he turned to the other, as I had further instructed him to do. Our best bets for finding a habitable place lying somewhere among the islands of the Pacific, giving them in considerable detail why that was so—the vast spaces, the comparative absence of worthy targets, the surrounding protection of large waters, the pattern of the earth’s winds—all the reasons he and I, along with Thurlow and Bainbridge, had so meticulously explored that day in the chartroom, and the conclusions we had arrived at: All of this he set forth in the most calm and cogent terms, in a voice free of the slightest taint of emotion, concerned only with the evidentiary and the probable; radiating himself the composed air of one who knew absolutely what he was talking about; everything about him suggesting a man of incorruptible allegiance to a single purpose: Where does the truth lie? He carried immense conviction. His very manner, I think, making the reactions to the monstrousness of what they were being told come more slowly than they otherwise might have, but then coming the more certainly. As he spoke I watched their faces, impenetrable reflections passing across them like clouds as the dawning comprehension of what was being said to them made its inexorable, its ferocious inroads into all the fortifications of hope they had so assiduously erected. It was a masterly presentation.

When he had finished a great silence seized ship’s company, so consummate that it seemed the very breathing of men could be heard. Selmon and I stood there waiting. Ship’s company waiting. No one, it seemed, wanting to break the adamant stillness—perhaps not yet having the voice to do so. After what Selmon had said, and this itself on top of the naked statistics set forth just previously by Girard and Melville as to matters of food and ship’s fuel, it seemed merciless what I had to do, like hitting a man when he was down. But it was for that very reason I knew I must proceed to do just that. To go after them while their defenses were breached, dealt such a blow. My part now to deliver the final one. I spoke into that silence.

“Shipmates.”

I looked across the waters, down the littoral of the continent, Suez—which we had reconnoitered—just beyond. I turned back.

I looked down at their upturned, waiting faces, all attentive, with a certain fixity of gaze, in each case directed on their captain, all silent; faces each of which I knew so well, knew the man or woman behind each face; each to me so individually different, particularized, over that range of personalities, temperaments, idiosyncrasies, existent in seamen, in nature it had always seemed to me marked by a much wider spectrum of variability than in landsmen; each known by myself and to each other in that intimacy of relationship, in its intensity, its absolute dependence on one another, one and all, to be found nowhere else on earth, only a ship offering it—youthful faces; older faces; faces of men, of women, faces of those still little more than boys, girls: faces in which, thinning, the first reflections of reduced food rations were just beginning to be observable; all of these my own; every face raised toward mine.

One does not harangue sailors. I spoke as any captain of the smallest sense speaks to them; directly, without frills, never in a raised voice. Sailors will hardly hear words said any other way, or if they do will dismiss them; sailors desire it straight.

“Shipmates, a choice must be made. Between going home and setting course for the Pacific. That
is
absolute. We cannot go home, then if we find it impossible to live there, go to the Pacific. You have just heard: We simply haven’t the fuel or the food to do both. It has to be one or the other. We cannot have it both ways.”

I waited a moment, unnecessarily perhaps giving each step of information time to be precisely absorbed, beyond the least doubt as to clarity.

“As for home: All of you know that we have never stopped trying to reach it by every means of communication available to us. All of you by now are familiar with the Bosworth signal. What is it? As far as can be determined it is a recorded message being sent out at prescribed times by some sort of computer device, with no meaning whatsoever that anyone has been able to make out. We have given them our position, our identification, everything, asked them to explain. Nothing but that same incoherent message. But a few human beings in Bosworth, Missouri, and perhaps some other places of the country are no reason for us to go home. For one thing, it’s as certain as anything can be that we could not get across the beaches and inland to where they are, if they are, and remain uncontaminated ourselves. In fact, as Mr. Selmon has said, radiation readings so high, anyone making that journey would probably die long before reaching them, especially since he’d have to walk to wherever they are.”

Waiting again for the same reason; as well, before delivering the hardest part of all.

“But aside from these reasons, I must give you another for not going back: I don’t think you want to see it. If we found people alive, we could not take them aboard this ship. The sicknesses they have would soon in all likelihood contaminate the last one of us. Could you go through that?” I found myself speaking harshly. “Not picking them up? Suppose, let us say at Charleston—because so many of us have homes there, that is probably where we would make for first—suppose we found living people and some of you had relatives among them—could you stand not picking them up, abandoning them? Something else: Should you decide to join them, jump ship, go down with them, do you think they would thank you for adding that to their misery? The last thing they would want would be for you to have to make that choice.” I came down as hard as I knew how. “You would not want to see them, the way they are. But more important even than what you want is that if they, a few of them, are there and breathing, they would not want to see you. Do you understand that? You have heard Mr. Selmon. They would be like those people on the beaches of Amalfi.
They would not want to see you. They would not want you to see them,’’
I repeated, the hardness for a moment overtaking me. I made my voice come softer. “You know what they would want? What they would say to you if they were here to say it? ‘For God’s sake, try to find a safe place for yourself.’ That is what they would say. ‘A place where you can live out your life, maybe do something, maybe start over . . .’”

I waited, reaching deep inside myself for strength to say it, feeling myself as much hearer as speaker of words, the sentence about to be pronounced being on myself as fully as on them—far more so, since if the course failed, I who had decided on it, who was promising so much, would be the chief criminal of all—words that began now to fall down over the men and seemed to drift out over the stilled and listening sea, she returning them like echoes of utter finality into our ears.

“Shipmates, we cannot go home. That is my decision. Not if we have remaining in us any will to live, any desire to survive. I take it that the last hand of us does. The ship is our country now. It is the only country we have. We have no other choice than to go through Suez. We are greatly fortunate that it is open. Since we have not enough fuel to go around the long way, by the Cape of Good Hope. Those of you who believe in God should consider that an immense gift. Those of you who do not should believe that this is a very lucky ship. We should all believe that in any case. We will use our fuel to transit Suez, proceed through the Indian Ocean, and commence our search where our best chances lie—among the islands of the Pacific.”

I was aware of their faces turned up to me with expressions of silence I would never forget, their eyes held in a fixity even now of not fully realized recognition of what they were being told; faces simply looking up at me, as the bearer of this news, in the unbroken stillness, the hush as of eternity under the bright sunlight now streaming down and setting the Mediterranean blue around us all dazzling; the world, life itself, the contemplations of men, seeming frozen in time, as though all chronometers had stopped and awaited a signal, a rewinding, to resume their ceaseless countdown; the unrevealed look of profound and hidden suffering, of anguish too great to allow its escape; knowing that no words could breach that grotesque and unutterable misery, the honor irremediable, and so best kept within; eyes looking up at me, seeming full of a great light, trying to grasp the ungraspable. And all the time themselves saying not a word. It was as though I was looking at men congenitally mute; unable to speak. I waited for that sense of triumph to come in me—instead came something else . . . Abruptly I felt an acute sense of inner disturbance. The breathless silence seemed to press down on me more than would have a chorus of protests, a cacophony of objections, eating into my resolve; the silence seeming brutal, as if it were their turn to be so for the brutality they had just been put through. One wished they would speak; at the same time, not wanting questions, one hoped contradictorily that they would not. The total silence from them held. In the beginning reassuring, it now of a sudden seemed infinitely menacing. It had been easy. Too easy. Something was not right. To the last hand ship’s company standing where they had stood through those agonizing minutes, or perched on ship’s fixtures—all motionless as in a sculpture. It seemed as though with a conscious effort to make clear and firm my voice that I gave the order.

“Duty watch, make all preparations for getting underway. Mr. Thurlow.”

“Aye, sir?”

“Make us on a direct course through Suez.”

“Just a moment, Captain.”

Lieutenant Commander Chatham had stepped forward.