During the night after the second battle, someone skilled in sign-painting had written—surreptitiously and in ten-inch letters along the curved steel soffit elevated forward of the RHIB—We’re Not in Kansas Anymore. It bound the crew together as much as had had the battles, and beautifully prepared them for what was to come.
A few days later, due south in search of Sahand, Rensselaer, Movius, and Holworthy were on the bridge in a rare coincidence of the three senior-most officers standing together during a lull. The horizon was empty, as it had been all day except for the sighting of a battered Chinese fishing ship heading east-northeast, perhaps laden with a catch from the cold waters near South Africa.
Out of the blue, Movius asked, “Captain, why are you in the Navy?”
“Are you suggesting that I leave?”
“No, sir. Just curious.”
Rensselaer decided, after a moment, to answer the question. “I grew up not that far from West Point, which for a kid in my high school was El Dorado. Everyone wanted in, and we thought we had an advantage because we were locals. But West Point was so popular I figured I’d have a better chance at the Naval Academy, and I did. I was young, and, like a duckling imprinted with the image of its mother, the Navy became part of me as I became part of it. And you?”
Movius deflected, asking Holworthy instead.
“Nine-Eleven,” Holworthy answered. “Somebody has to be the tip of the spear. There are people who do horrible things, and the world needs to be protected. We can’t be like them, but someone has to strike them down even if the people we protect don’t know the difference between us and them.”
“As famously stated,” Rensselaer said, “even if some of the sheep don’t know it, there’s a difference between the wolf and the sheepdog. And what is that, Mr. Holworthy?”
“The sheepdog doesn’t eat lamb.”
“I don’t know about that, but he has no lust for blood. Speaking about lust for blood, XO, you started this. What about you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“You can’t bug out now,” Holworthy told him.
“Okay. To begin, my father was a postdoctoral fellow. . . .”
“Where?”
“M.I.T.”
“In what?”
“Theoretical physics.”
“That kind of explains you,” Holworthy was pleased to interject.
“Maybe. His eyes were bad, and he wore bifocals. Not long after I was born, he was coming down the main stairway of the Boston Public Library. The difference in the bifocals must have thrown off his depth perception. I guess he stepped into the air. He tumbled headfirst down the whole flight. It was so bad that after many surgeries he was left blind, and, the best way to say it is, childlike: sweet, simple, appreciative, and not at all talkative. So, a guy with a doctorate in theoretical physics ended up as a news dealer in a downtown Boston office building. He was able to get there and back on his own, and he could handle the little business he had—newspapers, a few magazines, candy, and soda, which he called tonic.
“There’s not much money in that—he died eight years ago; the injuries didn’t help—and my mother was a violin teacher. What really killed us is that people would give my father a dollar and tell him it was a five or a ten. Or they would just take things if no one was watching, or take two or three papers or candy bars and pay for one. When they substituted bills, he could come home with negative proceeds and not even know it.
“We didn’t go on welfare, but we ate a lot of potatoes and pasta. When I was in high school, I would sometimes go downtown to pick up my father, and a few of those times I saw people steal from him. That’s when I learned about the legal system. The same guy who gave my father a dollar bill, told him it was a five, and got back four-fifty and a paper, sued us for assault—what else could I do when he kept going with the money?—and got five thousand dollars. It killed us.
“M.I.T. gave me a full ride, but not only was it not quite enough, I couldn’t help out at home as much as I had, and I had to give up one of my jobs that added to our income. I’d never thought of going into the military. I didn’t think I’d fit in.”
“You don’t,” Holworthy said.
“None taken,” Movius responded.
“But obviously you did . . . go into the military. Why the Navy specifically?” Rensselaer pressed on.
“A strange accident. My father used to listen to tapes for the blind. The Library of Congress sends them to you for free, and you can get almost anything.”
“Right,” Rensselaer said. “C. S. Forester? Patrick O’Brian? Herman Wouk?” He was going to say Tom Clancy, but Movius cut him off.
“Jack Benny.”
“Who the hell is Jack Benny?” Holworthy asked.
“That’s what I said,” Movius went on, “so I looked him up. He was a Jewish comedian, very famous in his day, born in the nineteenth century, died in the seventies of the twentieth. When I looked him up, there was a picture of him in spats, puttees, a Dixie Cup, an ammo pouch, and a nightstick. He was in the Navy in the First World War.
“It struck me. I could go to M.I.T. and get paid for doing it. Maybe I should have done a comparative analysis and considered the Army and the Air Force, but thanks to Jack Benny I went right into NROTC. At that time, they wanted mathematicians for ASW, and later I had some billets there until ASW was completely kneecapped in the budgets. Now they have a need for A.I., and after the war they’re going to pay for my graduate studies. At least that’s what they say. Guess where,” he asked Rensselaer.
“Where?”
“Caltech.”
“Where that girl, Hava, is going.”
“Yup.”
“How’s your vision?” Holworthy asked.
“That, I inherited from my mother. Twenty-twenty. Like a hawk. And as you can imagine, I’m careful on grand staircases.”
“Your mother still living?” Rensselaer chanced.
“Yes, and, thanks to my salary, well taken care of. My sister’s, too. She just got promoted. Public affairs in the Pentagon. One if by sea, one if by land.”
Then the three broke away to attend to their duties, Rensselaer vigilant but relaxed, Movius distracted by thoughts of the past, and Holworthy, as usual, like a bow string.