Argus had left the room to gather what information he could pertaining to weather in the predawn hours of the next day in the area where the Empress was being held, and to ascertain what information he could concerning British and Soviet submarine traffic in the area as well, in case weather precluded the preferred of the two options.
Hughes had been making a list, Babcock pacing the floor, stopping to stare occasionally at the same rerun newsreel footage of the Empress Britannia in happier days, before all of this, footage of the bombing of the Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks, which was linked to Seamus O’Fallon, footage of other terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland.
Babcock turned away from the television screens in disgust. “I think people like this stuff.”
“It’s like a soap opera to some people, only the characters are real; but, in a way, they’re not real at all. They see something that disgusts them and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then they flip channels and there’s ‘The Honeymooners’ or ‘I Love Lucy’ and they’re laughing again. And all the while, they’re on the road to oblivion.”
“You sound like a pessimist, Mr. Hughes.”
“I’m certainly not an optimist. Optimists rarely study violence, Lewis, because in their world, violence isn’t something that happens. It only happens to other people and if it ever does involve them, they sincerely expect that the rest of society will say ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and really mean it. But of course, very few people really mean it because very few people are ready to do anything about it if it happens to someone else, let alone themselves. When a confrontational situation occurs, they are willing to sacrifice the higher good they’ve always preached about for a good that’s even higher, their own self-preservation. And afterwards, if they’ve made it through alive, they congratulate themselves that they’re still around to help make the world a better place. True pacifists act out of dedication to principle, right or wrong, and because of that, are at least deserving of respect. But too many people are totally lacking in principle, lacking in anything that at all gives any depth or purpose to their lives. They just live; and, when death finally comes, they feel cheated. And, of course, they have been. But they weren’t cheated by death, only cheated by their lack of perception of life, cheated by themselves. Like baseball, Lewis. They missed their chance at a base hit simply because they were waiting to make a home run on a perfect pitch that on one level of consciousness they hoped would never come; and they were waiting so long, they only wound up being walked.”
Slowly, Babcock said, “You’re a cynic.”
“You’re observant. Tell me how you can do what we do even once, let alone more than that, without being a cynic? But yet, I’m not a true cynic; because, if I were, I’d say the hell with it and walk away from it, wouldn’t I? You and I, and Cross if we can get him back—we’re the fellows with the buckets put in charge of bailing out the boat after so many leaks have sprung, it’s impossible. And, just to make it interesting, we aren’t given buckets to use at all, just sieves. And, depending on our ingenuity and endurance, we can find ways of plugging up the holes in our sieves or work faster and faster. The result will be the same. The only advantage we have is that we can say we tried to slow it down a bit. Which brings us back to the concept of optimism. Each of us doing this sort of thing feels somewhere inside himself that maybe, just maybe, with the little extra time we buy before the ship of civilization sinks, mankind may figure out how to keep it from sinking entirely. And it sounds so much nicer to say you’re looking forward to the future optimistically than to just admit to all and sundry that you’re an asshole.”