The Last Ship (57 page)

There was one thing, strange as could be, as to which I speculated as operating in our favor, an element of assistance which I could not be certain of even as to its existence much less its degree. The women. Here I am not speaking of any active thing, such as Girard’s labors, but of something else. In some undefinable way I had the feeling that . . . I felt very uncertain as to this until the doc independently in one of our frequent sessions of considering every measure possible, himself basically as sardonic a man as I had known, said something very quietly to me. “My own opinion is that the mere presence of the women is keeping quite a number from going over the edge.” A return to his sharper tone, an indication that he did not wish to pursue this hypothesis. “Don’t ask me to explain it.” If true, and I felt now more and more that such was the case, it was—and remains to me—a mystery.

Still, of all that happened to us since the launching in the Barents, it was the one time I felt we stood on the very brim of the abyss. That deadly poison just outside the bulkheads seeming to enclose us, hug us ever more tightly to itself in a choking embrace, pressing down on us, as if in its fury of frustration that it could not get at our bodies, it would yet get at our minds. Fears real, fears imaginary: It became almost impossible to distinguish the one from the other, which was which—coming to feel dangerously at times that perhaps any distinction didn’t matter. As our ordeal continued, the unknowingness was what got at us; lacking any ability to figure it out, to put together the seemingly endless parts of this demoniac thing, so that we could even combat it, deal with it; lacking any true knowledge as to the fullness of its capabilities. Men deducing that a force that could so facilely alter the very fundamentals of temperature as a mere playful side effect would in time just as carelessly do whatever it needed to do to finish us off by some means it had not yet revealed; in the meantime toying with us as a sadist toys with the sure victim, wanting to prolong its pleasure, our terror. Yes, it was just that, the fact that, monstrous and intolerable, it seemed an uncomfortable apparition: That was the worst part of it. Our ship loaded with an immensity of destructive power, with every conceivable weapon to obliterate any enemy . . . all of this worthless against present foe, reliance on these inconceivably puissant arms becoming as some kind of savage joke played on us. One felt a towering fury at how this could be; how it could have come to happen; worst of all, nothing to vent the fury on. Some came to look upon it as some avenging terror—the matter of guilt, the Jesuit had told me, arising seriously for the first time in these, the quaint and bone-chilling idea that we, the ship’s company, the very ship herself were all reeking with blood and were at last being brought to justice for our contribution to the devastation of mankind. One sensed it more so each day, an unpredictable and terrifying combination of inner rage and total helplessness: The men trembled on the brink.

I knew well that it was only that shipmate brotherhood keeping us from foundering, but even it at times wavered before this onslaught. At times I feared we were but a step away from . . . not mutiny, but something quite different, something worse . . . anarchic extremities; what forms they would take unimaginable but certain to be terrible, merciless, perhaps dissolving, disintegrating us all. Once, as I was passing through the mess deck, a man stood up and blocked my way—Cantwell, a boatswain’s mate and our sailmaker, brawny, muscled, normally as mild as a man could rightly be, almost excessively placid—began what appeared to be a kind of cursing out of me built around the general theme of my having gotten us into this; a breathless hush suddenly hovering in the compartment as the men looked on. I listened in silence to this tirade, looked at him, dead in the eyes, a kind of wildness there, could feel the hair-trigger atmosphere all around me. Waited until he at last wound down. “Are you finished? You’re right about that, Cantwell,” I said. “Well, then. I’ll just have to try to get us out of it, won’t I? You men. Carry on.” Then another, worse time, when I stood on the ladder bringing them yet another of those by now uncounted reports of conditions topside—no change, no break whatsoever in the pall, I had once more to tell them—out of one of those ravaged faces upturned to me came a sullen voice. “Why didn’t you let us go with Mr. Chatham?” followed by a low rumble that sounded like a supporting chorus. I waited, standing what ground I had, the steps of a ladder, a feeling of a certain menacing surge of men toward myself, bringing everything in me to bear not to fling such words back in their faces, or at least not to speak in anger, still hearing a certain edge in my voice. “Let you?” I said. “Who among you was kept from doing so?” Another voice: “Why didn’t you take us back? We couldn’t be any worse off than we are.” “Couldn’t you?” my voice harder. “You’d be dead by now. Would you prefer that?” I stepped on down the ladder. The men stood aside and let me through. The moment passing like that, no assurance it would the next time.

The doc, himself looking benumbed with exhaustion from being at almost continuous watch, brought me frequent reports. Once: “I’ve gone over every member of the crew, Skipper. Let me get across a few physical facts. Pulse rates as high as a hundred seventy-three per minute, as low as twenty-nine—in some, at times almost imperceptible. The action of the heart: That concerns me most of all. In many, it seems to have lost its regulating force. One moment, quick, the next, slow: in the same man. No medical knowledge I possess explains it. We’re in new territory, Skipper. Frankly, I’m scared as hell.”

“You’ve got a great deal of company, Doc.”

“Nobody knows. Cooped up like that. That frigging stuff sitting down on top of us. Oh, I suppose one could supply all the usual textbook words. Paranoia. Hallucinations. Delusions. Everybody seeing things. I’ve seen a few myself. Hysteria now and then. They don’t cover it. I don’t know a word that does. All I can say is . . . they’re perfectly capable of losing control of themselves at any moment . . . they’re hanging on by their teeth, Skipper.”

The fact of the matter is, we all became a little deranged, some more than a little. We never realized it at the time, of course, how close to the crossover we came. One never does at the time. Our minds tottered, as of a ship listing sixty or seventy degrees, on each plunge into tumultuous seas, pushing against the limits of her inclinometer and her ability to right herself before she continued her peril-filled rolls into the deep, capsized; our minds did exactly that. To what degree, in the case of the bridge watches, these attritions were caused by the inroads radiation had made into us, to what degree because of the “living conditions” below decks I cannot say. No one could. But as day followed day, with most of the crew sealed below, as we seemed to go further into these mental rolls, pushing ever further against our emotional inclinometer, I at times had the feeling that the next roll would tumble us on over beyond any possibility of righting ourselves. The doc was right. One and all, they were entirely capable of losing control of themselves before even they knew it. To their immense credit, I could sense, as I have said, the great effort that even the most affected ones were making to control themselves—not to go berserk, not to break out into sudden, unstoppable screaming. If one did it, I felt others might, as in a contagion. That suddenly, in that mess deck, some maelstrom, some loosening horror—the nature and dimensions of which one could scarcely conceive—men suddenly clawing at one another, unspeakable acts—could, set off by the slightest spark, break out beyond any man’s control. Madness beckoned.

Even I. Yes, even my own mind wavered, came closer than I prefer to think. An instance: On the whole the women were bearing up better than the men. I could not understand it. The
James
and her class were the first vessels laid down and constructed from the beginning by the Navy with the direct intent of carrying “mixed crews.” Present as a plank-owner during her precommissioning days in the Pascagoula shipyard, watching her take shape, I was fascinated, at times sardonically amused, by the manner in which the builders so astutely engineered this capability, fashioning a bulkhead extending from the second deck to the weather deck between the women’s quarters and those of the men so that the former could not be entered save from above or through a secured escape scuttle. The sole normal ingress to the women’s quarters being by a ladder situated just below the pilot house and hence far from hidden. This security seeming to me almost excessive, so I thought watching it being built in. Even had a male sailor had the notion of making the attempt—this itself so ludicrous I could not imagine it—and arrived successfully below in those female purlieus, I used to think humorously . . . well, given the complement of thirty-two sailors, themselves exceptional representatives of their sex, trained in addition in all sorts of arts, not the least being self-defense—I would not choose to be that man. “Lucky to get out of there at all in possession of his balls,” I remember the foreman during the ship’s construction remarking to me.

As I was saying: On the whole the women to every outward appearance were calmer during our ordeal, not entirely free of the extremes of emotional reaction which now and then gripped some of the men, but, it appeared to me, more able to contain it, one or two exceptions. Observing this, I went so far, familiar with the widely held psychiatric idea that sexual accommodation often takes care of the problem of emotional disorder, its absence frequently causing it, as to have the horrible thought of suspecting them of solving the problem in their own way, in their sealed quarters which even I could not enter at will. I mention this only to illustrate how far my own mind at times deviated from any true course, if only briefly, quickly telling myself, as in this instance, that this was nonsense of the worst sort and of which I should be ashamed—and was—even to let the notion reach my mind; dangerous nonsense at that. Still, going so far in my fancy as actually to consider asking Girard about it. I must have been for that second almost literally out of my mind. As I say, all of us, in various ways, went a little mad. This was mine. Anyhow, the shock of recognition that I had even had such a thought brought me to my senses, informed me that the problem here was not whatever the women might be doing but my own chimeras. Thereafter, alert for any more of these that might come at me, ready, lacking clear evidence, to strike them down; probably nothing but my own sense of a ship’s captain’s mortal allegiance in such circumstances seeing myself through.

Parenthetically, the following: It was sometime during this passage through the dark and the cold that what would have seemed crushing, removing some last fine thread of hope, was made known to us—made known to me alone, I should say, and to Girard and Thurlow, no one else in ship’s company knowing of the arrangement with the submarine captain, a matter for which I now felt inexpressibly grateful. We had managed a couple of exchanges, ourselves telling him we were proceeding through heavy contamination, his reply far more cheerful—his submergence protecting him, how I now envied him and his ship that capability—informing us that, reconnoitering the Russian coastline, following the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk through the Kara and Laptev seas, he was negotiating the East Siberian Sea, with no difficulty heading toward destination; my heart had lifted. Then sometime back—losing all identification of time, I cannot pin down the precise date—we had lost contact with
Pushkin.
Repeated efforts to raise her, both at the agreed times of her surfacing for that express purpose, and at other times as well: Nothing came back from her. She had simply vanished. At first attempting with myself the spurious consolation that it was all a transmission difficulty having to do with the elements we were passing through, then reminding myself mercilessly that this, of course, had nothing to do with it, I faced up to the probability that she had been lost at sea—on such a perilous voyage, in such times as these, the number of ways that could happen was without limitation—and that therefore what little nuclear fuel we possessed, with its slim hope of holding out until we found something habitable, was all we would ever have; we would make it on that or not make it at all. Crushing, I said, the realization that that hope, of the Russian’s bringing us a fresh supply, had been so abruptly obliterated. Remembering a final time her last message, that she would reach Karsavina the following day, not naming that place, but the excitement, exuberance, the triumph, coming through: “Great hopes for Turgenev.” Then, as a conscious act, I brutally expunged
Pushkin,
her captain and her crew and her mission, from my mind as if they had never been. I turned inward, back to my own ship, my own ship’s company.

Back to my own: Nothing is more remarkable than man’s capacity for survival. Yet I thought the tension in the mess deck, the prison sentence stretching out, no end in sight, was approaching some breaking point, some explosion; the very real question of how much longer the men could take it, building as seas build under high winds and low pressure. Then these problems became as nothing, as a common cold, before evolvements infinitely more perilous to us, to the ship.

We never did anything like taking a muster. Frankly, the idea never occurred to me. If now and then the thought touched my mind that I had not seen a particular man for a couple days or so, the obvious answer was that he had gone off to be by himself, perhaps to cloak his manifestations from his shipmates, perhaps feeling that he could best work through them alone. There are innumerable places on a ship where a man might with ease accomplish this concealment. Storage lockers, sail lockers, steering-gear room, a couple score other sites. I scarcely knew it at the time in the turmoil of all that was going on, vaguely aware from time to time that this face was missing, that one, not certain but what its owner had gone to hide out in his misery in some remote part of the ship. Then one day the idea began very slowly to penetrate my consciousness—perhaps itself deadened somewhat by exhaustion—that there appeared to be what I might term an accumulation of absences; a certain number of men not having been seen by me for a number of days. Horror has its own way of announcing itself; not infrequently in a sudden illumination, an empiercement of the mental process. I knew in one instantaneous moment. Men were slipping overboard. A ship has many exits into the seas through which she moves, a man can go over the side quite easily, not even be missed for a while, particularly in the circumstances then obtaining. I immediately took a muster and discovered we had lost fifteen hands. Worst of all, three of them were women. I got the doc, the Jesuit, Girard in my cabin, door closed. Feeling myself going swiftly back and forth over some terrible dissonance of emotions that ranged from rage to desolation, stopping it by every exercise of will I had remaining from then slipping over the edge into that panic which, one knew as one knew nothing else, would take us all with it; perhaps these same elements at work in the others, I could not tell, their own forces of inner suppression surely equally applied. The conversation was hesitant in the extreme. It was as though we were afraid of words, of trying to spell it out, probe it, fathom it, as if dealing with some dark mystery which if investigated too far would explode in our faces. The most frightening intimation we had as to at least part of what was in process was contained in a note left where the Jesuit would find it by Bellows, a missile technician, one of those who had gone over; the Jesuit going on to suggest why the contents of the note indicated it was not an isolated case, that at least some of the crew were deliberately getting through some hatch or another to come to the weather decks, to stand by intention in that lethal atmosphere, deliberately contaminating themselves—some, it was possible, doing this more than once, then finally simply going over into the waiting sea. We all sat for a bit in a kind of horrified stupefaction at the very hideousness of it. The Jesuit continued.