It was as though my nights of prowling, of making myself accessible, had at last paid off; not in the way I would have chosen; finding not what I had hoped to find, though half-expected to; rather, what I dreaded most.
At least I am made aware, alerted. That is something.
All that day long we had glassed the beach. Not a sign of life. Not a human being. Not an animal. Nothing even worth picking up in our scavenging, not so much as a second wheelbarrow—an item, incidentally, almost obsessively desired by Delaney. “Very few things more important than a wheelbarrow, sir,” the gunner’s mate–farmer had informed me in his arcane way. A brief foray in the boat by Selmon showed prohibitive readings for any stay.
Then on this another of my nights of roaming with the intent of making myself available to all, I found myself standing along the lifeline next to Lieutenant Commander Chatham. No random encounter: I felt clearly, from the first, that he had sought me out here, having taken note of what was by now a nightly custom; having picked his moment. None about, due both to the lateness and to a gathering weather that hung heavy in a somehow portentous darkness; more of that heavy weather that seemed increasingly to come suddenly down on us in great contrast to the earlier prevailing stilled heavens, stilled seas.
We were without stars. Emerging from an opaque cloud cover a mild wind had come up, and one could feel under one’s feet the slow preludial pitch of the ship, these life signs of sea and elements almost a welcome thing after the long silences over mirroring waters. The ship seemed to like the change, riding eagerly through the shallow troughs. Characteristically for Chatham, never one for small talk, he came right to the point.
“Captain, I had a little chat the other day with the engineering officer.”
“Yes, Mr. Chatham?”
“We started talking how by cutting speed to, say, eight knots, we would take considerably less off our remaining available cruising time; it started me thinking about the idea of going just there and back.”
I was instantly alerted. Normally I would have spoken sharply concerning the circumspection of a Navy officer’s staying out of matters that were not his province, and in that area to await his captain’s request as to an opinion. These days I gave a wider rein. I was not so stupid as to attempt to control men’s thoughts, or even their talking with one another. After all, the amount of running time we had remaining was hardly confidential information. The very fact that he had spoken to such a matter was itself startling enough, unsolicited advice to her captain by subordinate officers a distinctly unusual thing on a man-of-war. Much more so was the possibility, coming immediately to mind, that he was speaking not just for himself, the likelihood even that had to be considered that he would not have done so unless he had a fair number of the crew behind him. This was the very last thing I should ask him. If true, it would certify his unauthorized role of spokesman for, leadership of, a part—how many?—of ship’s company, with a particular right to be heard; an inadmissible thing, none more so aboard ship. I must not grant him that. And it was by no means certain. Chatham was capable of speaking only for Chatham. Even so, he must have had to work up a certain boldness to broach the subject. Caution set in. I remained noncommittal. If he so wished, let him push on. No help in that respect would he get from me. He waited as if gathering his inner resources to do so, then began to speak. Normally with a rather rasping timbre to it, his voice now came also with a certain growing insistence that I did not like. “. . . And if we came straight back . . .”
“We would still have lost propulsion time.” I finished that sentence for him with a sharpness I had not intended. Certainly no one knew the figures more precisely than did I, the fuel loss at various speeds having been calculated with the greatest precision. “Valuable time. Perhaps crucial time. We’ve been over all this, Mr. Chatham. You have spoken with the engineering officer. Have you also spoken with Girard?”
“Why, no, sir, I have not.”
“Since you have started these inquiries, you might wish to do so.” I could not conceal all the sternness at what he was doing and I heard it now in my voice. “You might ask for the figures on the time remaining—I mean pursuing the course you refer to—we would have in her department. I’m talking about eating days, Mr. Chatham.”
“Captain, I was only . . .” In his voice was something much less of apology than a kind of resentful defensiveness, the barest touch even of truculence.
“I know, Mr. Chatham.” I tried to speak more softly. I could not see his features in the dark but I knew that he was quite aware that he had ventured into the most fragile of waters.
“Mr. Chatham,” I said . . . and then waited.
Far off the night’s first thunder rolled across the sky, merged with the sea’s ascendant tone. Abruptly I had a sense of something projected from the body alongside me into my own, shortcutting the avenues of speech or even conscious thought. Something clearly menacing, drawn near; I stood in new environs, overt questioning, hanging in the air a sense of machination, of maneuverance, touching on complicity. Then, as suddenly and in complete contradiction, perhaps because the verifiable ground for such thoughts were of the thinnest, I wondered if what I was really hearing from within him was a cry of private distress, a supplication for help. An officer taken in a moment with a malady which came without either warning or symptoms. Presented with an untoward manifestation from any of ship’s company, an occurrence of growing frequency to the point it had ceased to be a phenomenon, one’s mind stretched these days to include the widest spectrum of utterly opposing causes before settling on one or on none at all, cause remaining irremediably shrouded. The thing then disappearing as quickly as it had emerged. In this manner for a strange moment I felt in myself a disorientation, not knowing whether I was dealing with the rebellious, or, quite the opposite, with someone in some desperate need that he was incapable of articulating directly. Or with some unknown third or fourth thing.
Great columns of that soundless night lightning that we had been experiencing began to play hugely over the southern sky to starboard, altogether marvelous and continuing; revealing the commencement of long rolling waves across the naked seascape, a blossoming of whitecaps on the blackness of the waters, the distant desert to starboard in its undulating geometry. I wished extremely to turn and look him square in the face in its light but did not, fearful of the stark obviousness of such a thing. I looked across the ship’s bow. It was beginning to plunge more deeply into the troughs, slower in coming up. A sudden pitch threw us for a moment unexpectedly against each other. An absolutely unexperienced sensation shot through me—the contact of his body against mine seemed an unpleasant thing, one almost of distaste, this feeling itself so astonishing to me in respect to a shipmate that it seemed at once to constitute a warning, as of some dangerous bias toward a particular officer when there was nothing of any real substance, other than words, I could lay against him.
Perhaps in consideration of these speculations, ambivalences, a softer tone was the response called for. Certainly he had identified an amount of hostility in me toward his approach, likely to enhance rather than pacify the air of disquiet. Fearful of suspecting what was not there, I decided to reprimand him no further, not to build up alienation: To come through we would need not that but brotherhood. We had no more deadly enemy than divisiveness: true always of a ship, with its closely lived existence, in our circumstance greatly compounded. Men had a right to know they would be told, and presently. Surely they had sensed that anyway, indeed informed so by myself. But let him spread the word afresh. He seemed to have become adept at that. I spoke with quiet clarity, not untempered with firmness, striving for a balance between not diminishing him and yet squaring him away.
“Mr. Chatham,” I said, “we cannot do both. Do you understand that?”
“I understand what you say, sir.”
I fought back the flash of anger, at the obstinacy, the impertinence, of this answer. I had heard enough. It was not the time to get into it, nor would any time be with a single officer. When the moment came, it would be a thing to be shared with the last and lowliest rating in ship’s company, all equals at that point. To discuss it further in this privacy was not only unseemly behavior for a captain, not the way to do things; it would also only confer on the CSO a special authority that I had not the slightest intention of recognizing. It should be stopped at once. This time I spoke with a manifest severity. Even so I went further than a captain normally did, or ought to do, to accommodate, in such a revelation to himself alone; along with some home truths.
“Mr. Chatham, here is the straight dope. The answer to what you’re wondering is that I have not as yet made up my mind. I have neither resolved upon nor ruled out the course you suggest,” going that far even. “When I come to a decision, I’ll let you—and all hands—know. It will be soon. Is all that understood?”
“Yes, sir. It’s understood.” Still a slightly sullen note. Never mind. He had got the word. Then, just as I had thought the matter finished, it hit me squarely in the face.
“Captain, we want to participate in the decision.”
I turned on him in as strong an anger as I had ever felt, or shown, since becoming a ship’s captain.
“‘Participate’? ‘We’?”
So it had gone this far. I waited a moment for the thing to settle in me, that inward hardness which, long since, entirely reflexive by now, had become my armament in extreme confrontation, every idea of indulgence toward this officer vanished.
“Listen well, Mr. Chatham.” I could hear my own voice, quiet, cold, in the sudden hush, the deadly taut atmosphere, as if even the sea herself, always curious as to such developments in her domain, had paused to listen. “I intend for there to be not the slightest misunderstanding. As to ‘participate.’ This ship will continue to have a captain. He will reach his decisions as Navy ship’s captains do. With such counsel from ship’s officers as he feels needed, receiving it in the way it is always offered: when he asks for it. As to the ‘we’: I do not wish to know their names. But you may take that word back to them. The affairs of the ship will continue to be conducted in the manner just described. If all that is clear then let us speak no more of it. Do you understand me?”
Out of the dark the simply monotonic, the voice of the subordinate returned, still sounding no more than the requisite. “As you say, sir. I understand you.”
“Good night, Mr. Chatham.”
“Good night, Captain.”
Dismissed, he disappeared into the darkness forward.
* * *
I stayed awhile, the extra heartbeat receding before the assurance of the ship under me taking on the rising waters. Now the elements began to unfold for my pleasure a modest, unthreatening display of weather, nothing for her to worry about, the ship dipping into the deepening valleys of the sea, each time with a faint shudder that moved up through her keel, up through the spaces of the ship to the weather decks, up through my legs, my body. I could hear above and forward the wind slapping the halyards and see the glow of the running lights leading us on into the night. The rhythmic sound of the ship’s foghorn reaching down from the bridge—the routineness of the precaution, as if beyond the mists there was another ship closing on us, stabbing me like a physical pain. And suddenly I knew. Knew as surely as I stood there looking at the throbbing, lightning-illuminated sea, that Chatham was implicated. Deceit has almost a scent to it. No, not just that. Factiousness. Even the Jesuit had hinted as much. And putting all the signals together, an immense foreboding seized me; some disturbing and threatening element had come aboard, involving the CSO in some inexplicable manner. And the further thought, sending an icy chill crawling up and down my spine: If Chatham had been bold enough to approach me thus, argue with me as to the possibility of the impossible, what had he been saying to the others? Implanting hope for a place where all hope was gone? Prodding their thinking and their desires toward the most perilous and heartbreaking of expectations concerning their very home? Cruel this was.
Big foaming seas had begun to come out of the blackness, the ship responding each time with a tremor, readily conforming, adjusting, my face wetted by the salt spray, seeming to clear my mind to see into the truth of things in this solipsistic darkness: the ship more and more becoming split into opposing camps; the shores of the Mediterranean continuing to signal us their refusal to offer safe habitation, the hard consequent fact that, barring still possible changes in that respect, at Suez we would have to commit ourselves, never looking back, to one of the two choices available as to course; despite anything that Chatham had put about or that any others of ship’s company might have led themselves independently to believe, that we were compelled to do one, fuel and food supplies dictating we could not do both—any seaman apprentice who used his head could figure that one out. Those who could not were simply identifying wish with fact: This tendency I accepted as natural in men and was one reason, among others, that it had never occurred to me seriously to consider any such notion as putting the matter to a vote.
I had long since come to terms with the possibility, even probability, that in the case of one of the two courses, should I decide on it, the loyalty to myself of the most faithful and unswerving of men might well be put to the severest test. Refusal, if I should issue it despite whatever opposition, to obey a lawful order. An effort even to take the ship. Nothing could be ruled out. In my mind I could even understand it, told the awful finality of what the men would have to be told. Men informed they would never see home again: Who could predict how it would take them? An understanding which did not for one moment admit the possibility of allowing it to succeed. My resolve lay in the confidence in my ability to control it well before it reached any such state; to reason, to persuade, drawing on the trust I felt resided in them toward their captain; the decision set forth to them in that firm mastery which traditionally had brought obedience from sailors in the direst of circumstances, ships being able to function in no other known manner; yet knowing that simply to command, to give an order, was no longer enough. I must compel belief from them by what came down to an absolute moral assurance on my part (the Jesuit was right in that): my way at least offering hope, if against odds; the other guaranteeing disaster, no odds at all. Our fate had always seemed to me to rest absolutely on our remaining united, a band of brothers. Nothing in my thinking took into account that the lines would be rigidly drawn, certainly not to the extent of either group having a leader, and he an officer. That brought a sense of authentic fear, of a foreboding greatly enhanced that it should be this particular officer; the last officer I should wish to discover at that work, for the simple reason that, as I have remarked, short only of the captain he is the most powerful officer aboard. Combat systems officer. As such, the most potentially dangerous of officers in circumstances, if remote, still not at all hard to imagine as possibilities in our near future. I was allowed to hope that the admonitions just delivered would have effect, stop in its tracks a movement already clearly underway; I would be an idiot to count on it.
I heard the ship under me, its very sound seeming to remind me of the true seat of my concern: the ship herself. The fact that we ourselves were such a stupendously dangerous device, racked up in magazines not far below where I stood 44 Tomahawks, each carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, a capability of destructiveness even I had really never attempted to comprehend; this infinite instrument able to go anywhere, do anything, now beyond any control other than that of the people aboard her. Yes, the truth was this: All of my anxiety, my dread, immense and profound, lay in not wanting another to gain dominion over this force, least of all an officer like Chatham, trusting no one but myself with such power. There it was.
From the rising sea I could feel now and then a tossed-off spray touching my face; refreshing, freeing up, it seemed, the full faculties I now brought to bear as I undertook quietly to assess the circumstance, even allowing myself to stretch it to its extreme limits. I was positioned by the lifeline aft, a matter of feet away from the after missile launcher. Due perhaps in part to its proximity, I had for the first time a thought that sent through me a wave of shock quite unlike any I had ever experienced in regard to the ship and the people on it, or any one of them, relating to a matter I have touched on, my growing concern over the fact that Chatham held, jointly with myself, the key to the missiles themselves, and to the devices that would send them off . . . the mind halted, made a movement, opened a door, permitting something quite terrible to enter, an errant and wild thought of what might happen if they should fall into the hands of one bent—for whatever reason or cause, fancied or real enemies, madness, revenge upon the human race itself or what might be left of it if you took the ship across the seas looking for these remnants . . . Perhaps the thought itself was the truly mad thing; but perhaps not, one often hardly knew of late, the rational and the aberrant sometimes seeming separated by a line thin as a human hair: The mind had presented only what was after all factually, insofar as we had knowledge of it, a largely accomplished matter. What remained might be viewed as merely a mopping-up operation . . . of the species . . . Chatham, for instance—I had not the slightest doubt of this—would have blown that Russian sub out of the water . . . All doors now opened, I even remembered once, in some random wardroom conversation, his saying, “I am glad to be a member of the generation that will see the last of the human race,” a remark taken so unseriously at the time, viewed by all who heard as intended as shock treatment—perhaps Chatham angry at some mechanical problem aboard ship in his complex charges, the missiles, all of this long forgotten. Now suddenly even that surely ridiculous remark came back to repeat itself to me—preposterous that I should think of it just now; not able for a moment to bring myself to believe he, any man, could believe that literally. Still, the mind, recalling it, filled with a kind of distortion, a madness of its own . . .
The mind stepped back from the horror, slammed the door: but not before imbedding in me an idea untainted by the slightest doubt, cold as truth could be, felt now infinitely more sharply, frighteningly, than before: I would not want the missiles . . . weaponry I had even considered jettisoning, an impossibility without the collaboration of his key, no way even to get them off the ship without it, something he was certain never to give; his more than touch of arrogance I had long felt could itself be traced to his feeling of proprietorship as to the missiles . . . I would not want them under the governance of Lieutenant Commander Chatham. After the initial brutal impact of the idea, with surely its excesses, this I judged not excessive at all. Though I tried to put it away. To no avail: It was to hang on, never to leave me, try as I did to make it do so. Rather to increase: myself to come in rather a short time almost to wish for some act on his part (Was it this? Was I actually hoping he would undertake to lead a party against my choice as to course?) that would justify my separating him from his key: the fact of our keys canceling each other, one impotent without the other, somehow seeming no longer adequate protection—if I was considering going after his, it was not a difficult step to imagine his contemplating going after mine; the first time, too, for that terrible thought.
The mind halted, came to a full stop; aware that such imaginings, whatever their portion of truth, themselves could become the true danger. I looked up at the heavens. The clouds had opened up a small space, just sufficient to permit a handful of brave stars to gaze tremulously down, their abrupt appearance, sparkling as a cluster of diamonds on a black field, immediately somehow lifting my spirits. In their glow I reminded myself that we had not given up all hope on the Mediterranean. Some time back Selmon, in view of the absence of life on the beaches, had suggested a land foray of a kind not yet undertaken to establish perhaps conclusively the facts there, one way or the other. Involving a not inconsiderable personal risk, hence a risk for the ship, in his being such an indispensable officer, which had made me wish to think it over and to postpone decision. Now I decided to turn him loose on it tomorrow. It was something we had to know.
With the conversation with the CSO I ceased my nightly rovings and returned to the traditional calm austerity, and a certain remoteness, of a ship’s captain. Just as well. Applicable to the ships that traverse the great oceans, there stands a small handful of rules, known to all mariners from times the most ancient, so validated by the centuries, on vessels of every description, ship’s companies of every origin, as to be immutable. Among these is that which states that the concept that some favorable result is to be achieved by a ship’s captain’s efforts to draw closer to his men through so-called familiarity, by an effort to diminish the distance between them which the all-knowing sea herself has long ago decreed, is but the most naïve of myths, in fact dangerous in the first magnitude to the ship’s very functioning, not least to the welfare of the men themselves, and the captain who attempts it a fool. If anything, the law held more firmly in our circumstance than ever. Men are to be commanded; and to be loved.
* * *
As stated, I had no intention of majority rule in the matter, not the remotest thought of instituting some shipboard seagoing plebiscitary system; the whole notion foolish in the extreme, perilous as a thing could be. But now, considering the possibility that I may have gone too far in my estimate of his potential for bringing disaster upon us; considering above all that unforgiving precept that a ship’s captain, in his sovereignty, his power, in the absence of the normal checks and balances that restrain men, carries in him by these very essentials of his position more capacity for being wrong than perhaps in any trade men follow and therefore must never forget that he may be . . . reminding myself of these verities, very soon I found myself actually having a look at Chatham’s proposal. Of allowing ship’s company to make this one decision on the moral idea that they had a right to decide something so irreversible as to their own future lives. For the first time since assuming command of this ship, I considered in all seriousness letting them do so. Nothing could have been more strange, the very act, the mechanics of it, so contrary to the world of ships and of sea life. How in the name of heaven would you go about it—call for a showing of hands, with the majority to rule? Even the visualizing of it made it seem a ludicrous thing: sailors raising their hands while the captain counts them as in some sort of town meeting voting whether they wished to do this instead of that. Its only virtue—and a compelling one—appeared to be that it was the one certain way of forestalling any possible revolt in the crew: They could hardly object to a course chosen by themselves. But on further consideration, even this supposed advantage appeared to have its inbuilt fallacy.
What if the vote were close? You would then have a ship split against itself. I was far from sure ship’s company would even want to make the decision: Among other things it would force each hand to declare himself before his shipmates, the divisiveness then a known and permanent thing, brought starkly out in the open. Shipmates thereafter working alongside one another knowing that there existed a profound disagreement among themselves as to the most fundamental of matters: where the ship was taking them. A ship divided on such an issue: I could taste, as surely as I could tell the movements of stars, her pernicious fruits. Bitterness, rancor, dripping so into that incessant immensity of tasks, navigation, engineering, and the rest of it that constitute proper shiphandling, as to threaten the ship at every turn in a world that has always been constructed on the principle of unquestioned one-man rule: orders, commands, decisively given by the captain and obeyed unhesitatingly by all others aboard, men and officers alike. This at a time that called for men working together to the utmost, shipmates toward a goal desperate enough of achievement even so.
As I continued to think on the matter, so many other objections presented themselves as to seem unending. To be allowed to make this decision might make them wish to make further ones; control of the ship and the course she should take slipping through the captain’s hands, and at the very moment, fuel and food headed inexorably toward the zero point, that we commenced our most perilous times. A ship soon to be without a rudder. I would not myself wish to be on such a vessel even as the lowliest seaman; would flee from her as from a death ship.
And the final and greatest argument of all: They might make the wrong decision, based on false sentiments, unrealistic hopes; based on the wish that matters were a certain way, rather than on what they were; feeling confident I, the captain, could and would in the end turn away from such lures; much less certain that a diverse body of men given such authority would do the same.
No. I would make this decision as I made all others; fully aware that that method also was not without risk; it not being inconceivable that those against whose preference the decision fell might go so far as to rise up. I did not believe so. But whether it should happen or not: No weight must the prospect be granted. For a sea captain, that a course having been chosen by him as in his view the sole right one, has really no choice but to march into it; simply put, do the duty and take the burden that are lawfully his alone to carry out, his alone to bear.