Years since it had become obvious what the initial objective of both sides would be: that at least the two had in common, mirror images of strategy. This was simply to take out, in the first minutes of any conflict, the command, control, communications, and intelligence network (C3I) of the other. Otherwise known as “decapitation,” another of that lexicon which came so obscenely to dominate and corrupt the effective language of the latter years of the century. (In the mindless vulgarity of the time, colorful phrases were evoked to picture the flawless beauty of these acts: “cut off the head of the Soviet chicken,” as an instance, the authors of such metaphors smirking self-congratulatorily at their picturesqueness, as though speaking of some devilishly clever prank.) Decapitation: It was a relatively easy undertaking, though said by some to be easier for them than for us, due to their greater geography and dispersion. For them, the objective was to be achieved by launching simultaneously on Washington, D.C.; SAC Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Nebraska; the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) in Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs; three or four other backup places; and perhaps a dozen critical communications relay points including essential satellites, their locations all well known, their elimination a routine matter; to accomplish all of this requiring no more than thirty minutes at the extreme outside (if done entirely from their own territory), with a strong possibility that that figure could, with proper placement of launching platforms (submarines off American cities), be cut to fourteen minutes or even nine.
The idea was twofold and a genius of the manifest: (1) to remove the political-military leadership, the National Command Authority; and (2) aided by the Electromagnetic Pulse generated by a high-altitude burst, to leave remaining no means of communication through which to send retaliation orders even had there been anyone left to do so. Someone had speculated that the ideal time of all, the perfect time for the other side, would be when the President of the United States was delivering his annual State of the Union message, since on that occasion the entire American succession would be gathered in not just one city, Washington, D.C., but in a single room, the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill: fifteen constitutional successors to himself, from the Vice President clear through the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the Secretary of Transportation; present also would be the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who while not in the official succession would presumably be prepared if alive, the succession all dead, to take upon themselves, in the absence of any lawful provisions or authority, nonetheless to strike back in such a circumstance; parenthetically present also all members of both houses of the Congress. This wealth of potential usurpers to power gone, who then would anoint himself to give battle back? If he did how could he discover the various rituals—necessary ciphers, Go-Codes and the like—to accomplish a response? And if he did, how could he without any means of communication execute them? And if he found such means, would commanders on the other end follow instructions from this dubious and illegal source?
The whole proposition was so simple that it was everywhere taken for granted that whatever other ancillary strategies there might be, this was certain to be the principal one employed by whoever moved first. By the process of deductive reasoning, our having received no orders from anyone, in any place, one could come to no other conclusion than that this was precisely what had happened, that is to say, removal of all National Command Authority, along with the extermination of means of communications by both direct and EMP forces (though not at the State of the Union, that being always in January). One overwhelming imponderable remained: How had retaliation (if that, instead of first-strike, was indeed what it was) been achieved? Only two theories appeared plausible: first, that the authorities themselves had had sufficiently lightning reflexes to execute response even as the incoming missiles were upon them; or that, had these reflexes been found wanting, someone not on the above list but sufficiently highly placed to have access to the stipulated “rituals” had taken it upon himself in those crucial minutes, even seconds, that remained, to get off one general order before being obliterated along with all communications; thus achieving mutual decapitation. A hypothesis, whichever of the two starter mechanisms actually employed, supported by our own orders to launch having come from TSP (Trinity Security Procedures), both that designation and the ciphers containing the orders being held under the ultimate classification, known at the starting end by an irreducible handful of highest authorities, the ciphers changed daily and reserved exclusively for one of two purposes: to give orders to launch, to give orders not to launch; further supported by the cessation of all communications not long after our launchings.
To these various conclusions, their general tone supported both by the reports picked up by the Russian submarine commander and by the Bonne-fille’s radioman, the uninhabitability of Africa, established tentatively by our own shore incursions and conclusively, it appeared, by Lieutenant (jg) Selmon’s deeper one, added the final building block that installed in firm place my resolve not to take the ship to America; further, I had reached the sanguine determination that, abetted by such overwhelming evidence from such a variety of independent sources, I could now safely and with comparative ease win the men over to this inevitable position.
Then the signal from Bosworth arrived. A signal from that same origin and in that same encryption that had not reached us since that morning, seeming now so infinitely long ago though actually but six weeks, when it had instructed us to launch our Tomahawks high into the cold blue skies of the Barents Sea. From NCA: National Command Authority. Sent in TSP: Trinity Security Procedures.
* * *
From the beginning and continuing to the present moment, nothing had commanded more of our dedication—never, in truth, infringed by hopelessness, by disheartenment—than our efforts to bring forth responses from our communications system. I need hardly speak of its prodigious sophistication or belabor the technical aspects of its electronics, highly classified, unknown to the civilian world, even to whose highest experts its talents would have been wondrous . . . even to myself, accustomed to devices, tools, beyond the frontiers, still a marvel of capability, awesome. Manned constantly, in rotation on every frequency, with special attention to the channels known officially as Survivable Very Low Frequency Communications System, which had been brought to a level of performance that had seemed, beforehand, able to pick up whispers from the remotest places and to break through or around every known type of interference or defense, whether created by man or the elements. Originally pursued by the Navy, as I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, specifically to deal with what had been one of the most dangerous and frightening of problems—the difficulty in reaching a submerged nuclear-armed submarine in, let us say, the Sea of Okhotsk, for purposes, for example, of instructing it to unleash its payload—or, conversely, not to unleash it—these channels, as refined, exquisitely perfected I should put it, by Navy persistence, breakthroughs in the art, had become the least fallible method for long-distance communications the insistent genius of man had yet devised.
It was on one of these that it came through.
The signal was sent at 1700, no one remarking then the precision of the time, no reason to do so. It came in with full audibility, free of distortion, clear and clean. The frequency was 26.125 kHz, which our confidential VLF manual readily identified as belonging to a global Navy Communications Center situated in Bosworth, Missouri, used primarily we knew to communicate with those same submerged U.S. ballistic-missile submarines. The message when broken reading in entirety:
FLASH 171700Z
FM: NCA
TO: ALL SHIPS
BT
ANY SHIP, REPEAT ANY SHIP, REPLY
IMMEDIATELY
URGENT
ANY SHIP, REPEAT ANY SHIP, REPLY
IMMEDIATELY
URGENT
BT
We immediately replied; received no answer in return. From that moment we continued to reply without cease, eliciting no response at any time other than a repetition of the original message. This had a peculiarity. Starting with that first time, it came, the message itself never varying, like the voice of some oracle of idiosyncratic, perhaps even purposeful habits chosen for a reason it did not deign to disclose, or perhaps even was unable to do so, perhaps even hopeful that we could figure out why, always on the hour and only on the hour. I was glad that in composing our reply, a captain’s caution at work, I had withheld two elements: our exact longitude-latitude position—the general area the receiver would know by our transmission; and our precise identification as a guided missile destroyer, contenting myself only with what seemed needful, an unnamed U.S. Navy vessel; strictly instructing Bainbridge, our communications officer, not to go further in these revelations unless otherwise ordered by myself. It was after all more than the sender had done: He had not even said who he was, notwithstanding that our replies continued to ask him this question in particular.
* * *
I stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing and looked across the water to the shoreline of north Africa, along which we had been running our slow parallel course, moving eastward toward Suez. I scanned it first with the naked eye, then through Big Eyes; nothing moved, even the branches of trees behind the beaches motionless; a continent becalmed; lying silent under still skies across which echelons of cumulo-nimbus drifted indifferently; the great mass of land seeming almost menacing in her death throes, the sentence Selmon had pronounced on her, this hardly a metaphor, the continent being or in the process of becoming infinitely hostile to man, to the animals, unaccepting of them—I felt a shudder go through me; turned away to look at the blue plain of the Mediterranean stretching away to the eastern horizon, the sea seeming forever alive. Below me I could see lookouts circling the ship, together holding captive the 360 degrees of the compass and anything that might appear on it. I looked up. The faintest tremor of wind stirred the halyards, was gone, the flag and commissioning pennant silent again after that brief flutter. I knew then. Despite the peace of all elements I could scent weather in the air; could just make out the underlayers of olive hue, unerring signposts, beginning to form like belt bands on the enlarging clouds. I turned and made my way below and into the wardroom where the gathered officers started to rise.
“As you were.”
As they all settled in, I turned promptly to my immediate right.
“Please proceed, Mr. Bainbridge.”
Lieutenant Whitney Bainbridge was nearly bald, with a circle of strawberry hair giving a tonsurelike effect that made him look a member of some monastic order; he had an innocent, slightly feminine manner which I personally found rather appealing; he was of the Catholic faith and had six children back in Lafayette, Indiana, where he had settled in after Purdue; his mind seemed always to be concentrating on something, perhaps esoteric code groups. He was perhaps the closest thing to a wizard (short possibly of Selmon) we had aboard, communications-electronics having become so vastly both more complex and more crucial since my early days in destroyers, having become a branch of warfare itself; so specialized that Bainbridge was by definition of his field—and of our condition, his person embodying our sole potential contact with the outside world—always attentively listened to. The incoming transmissions, each taped, had been meticulously scrutinized, analyzed, repeatedly so, for irregularities in rhythm, pitch, infinitesimal differences in pauses between code groups. Bainbridge repeated now for all to hear what we had discovered; it was not entirely a blank, a zero; there was something at least; actually something of possibly the first importance, the seeming clues, however, only raising more questions than they answered.
“The critical aspects are these. First, it purports to be from National Command Authority. That this may actually be the case is given validity by the fact that they’re using TSP ciphers—in combination with Navy codes. Second, whoever is sending it knows Navy methods—the form of the message tells us that. Third—and this is the part that as communications officer gets to me more than anything else—in the three days we’ve been receiving it they have used a new code each day, starting precisely at zero zero zero zero, ending precisely at twenty-four hundred and exactly then starting another new code. Now since there are no more secrets . . .”
He looked over at me and I nodded. “Since there are no more secrets I can say this. All Navy codes are changed on a daily basis. Every twenty-four hours you have to place a new code in the electronic devices we use to transmit and receive radio messages—that’s why the system is essentially unbreakable; crypto change cycles. What all this means in this Bosworth business is that whoever is doing this: one, he has exact knowledge of top-secret Navy procedures; two, he has access to top-secret Navy codes; and three—and this is the most important single element to these messages, as I mentioned—whoever he is, he possesses the Trinity Security Procedures.”
Again he looked at me interrogatively. I nodded approval. Aboard the James only Bainbridge, myself, and the combat systems officer, Chatham, even knew of its existence. There being no need any longer for this selectivity, he tossed out the fact rather offhandedly to the officers at large.
“Of course it was always the single most highly classified series of ciphers of all. It’s what we used launching Tomahawk. On the sending end, fewer people had it than had anything.”
The communications officer paused and we sat a moment in somber comprehension of this litany of facts and suggestions and what their meaning might be.
“The exactness of the repeated message?” I said.
“Yes, sir. Of course we’ve been using perforated tape or computer generated message transmission for quite a while now. Where someone wanted to repeat something. The only possible area of variability is the timing of the messages, and even this can be done by a computer—in fact, is done that way in submarines.”
“But as to the Bosworth signal specifically, Mr. Bainbridge?” I said, a bit impatiently.
“Sir, the invariability in pulse rhythm makes it almost certainly an automated transmission. No change whatsoever we can detect, one transmission from another—not even the minute, unavoidable alterations that manual transmission of the same message would reflect. An opinion fortified by the exactness of the hourly transmission times.”
He hesitated, looked at me, and said, almost as if to make certain I had not forgot it:
“The one thing we do know, there is no doubt as to the geographical source.”
His voice carried the suggestion of a bias in favor of the sender, of a willingness to believe. I looked at him carefully.
“Yes, I know, Mr. Bainbridge. And the sender himself, the agent?” My voice suddenly sounding hard to my ear, inquisitorial, cross-examining. “His identity? Nationality? Any hints in those directions?”
“None we have discovered, Captain. Other than what he claims to be. Fortified of course, as I noted, by his possession of Trinity Security Procedures.”
He looked back expectantly at me, just waiting.
“As to TSP,” I said. “By now, anybody could have come into possession of it.”
“I suppose so,” Bainbridge said rather distantly; again just waited.
“It could be a trap,” I said, a little impatiently, wanting him to say more.
“Yes, sir. It could be. I’ve even wondered if it could somehow be connected with the Russian submarine.”
“We’ve been getting regular reports from them,” I said, astonished.
“I know. The idea is ridiculous, isn’t it? It only shows . . .” He hesitated, as though floundering, sighed heavily. “It could be almost anything.”
And stopped. I looked at him. It was just that, nothing more; one felt annoyed at these generalities, hence a bit annoyed at Bainbridge himself. But in truth there seemed nothing more to be said: thoughts, all analysis, run up against—so far, at least—an unyielding, impenetrable wall. It needed surely still to be continually tested since even such barriers can with persistence and resolve, with ingenuity, be breached—we had done so before; of course, an officer like Bainbridge, who possessed all of these qualities, would not stop doing that; he didn’t need to be told. And yet, seeming an instance above all to be probed relentlessly, one felt a hesitancy in the face of this one, a smell of danger even in the trying, as if it meant us harm—a sense activating itself subconsciously, viscerally, beginning with the withholding of the ship’s latitude-longitude position and of our precise identity I had ordered . . . A feeling somehow that utmost peril lay an inch behind that wall, that message. A message sticking a splinter of doubt into the conclusion on which all our actions hereto had been based and upon which, as above noted, I had decided finally to act, set our course. Selmon’s African findings having been conveyed to the officers and, coming on top of the reports furnished by the Russian submarine commander, with the possible exception of Lieutenant Commander Chatham seeming at last to convince any waverers that such was substantially the fate as well of the place we had called home. Myself ready to announce my decision to the crew. And now this remote new element, possibly altering everything, and yet surely ephemeral, insubstantive, just because the sound bore all the aspects of a recording, a tape, as opposed to that from a being with life still in him. It was true that a mystery remained, embodied in a single question: What force then had activated it? A question one knew to a certainty now thrust itself into each soul present. It was not odd that the inability to answer this question should not act to convince us of its opposite: a living human being somehow behind that transmitting device. We had lived too long with mysteries, by the dozen, by the score, to be much impressed by them; less, fooled. Enigmas, never solved, had become a part of our lives, routine. To this was added a pragmatic vein: We had too much experience with what preset lifeless computers could do.
And yet, I say, a doubt had been inserted into our equations of high probabilities . . . of certainties as most of us by now held them to be. Fragile as a thread, this particular doubt, considering its geographical source, the first from there, wove itself sinisterly, tantalizingly, into our thoughts, our consciousnesses, our beings, where one from another part of the globe might on such suspect evidence have been dropped with alacrity, dismissed out of hand. And slowly but unmistakably from around the table I could feel it growing as a cell splits and multiplies. Leaving us finally with one last question to eat into our souls: Was that thread’s name that one unmeasurable force, half mythic, half intensely real, which never ceased at once both to threaten us and to keep us going—was its name only hope? Of wanting to believe the presence of substance, of anything; when so much experience, so much intelligence subjected to the most rigorous analysis by men formidably gifted at such tasks, had taught us only emptiness was there? Surely we had by now become too—immunized, hardened?—for such luxuries. Nonetheless, this troubled palpable feeling of uncertainty, however hesitant, had infiltrated the souls present, the very air of the wardroom itself. Yes, myself. Adulterated with that inexplicable fear—one could reach out and touch this. Without knowing why, I could feel that the transmission, even the pursuit of its perplexity, its secret, represented, as I have suggested, a danger of a high magnitude; a devil’s temptation; it was as though each time we replied the danger came nearer, that this was the very intent of the hourly incoming signal, that each exchange of transmissions brought that uncertain force, perhaps was intended to, zeroing in on us, and with hostile intent . . .
One felt a certain anger at these speculations; an anger at one’s own fears; a feeling that our isolation had acted to make for fear’s inbreeding; a danger of making cowards of us all, starting with the ship’s captain; seeming an excessive timidity at best, where perhaps a tempered audacity was the quality called for. We were the last thing from being helpless; armed still, a 704-H ship, with a strength so vast as to give pause to any possible foe who might contemplate inflicting injury on us . . . The train of thought fed back on itself, collapsing in frustration, in irresolution, in something like dismay; the threat suggested in the transmission remaining. I turned back to Bainbridge—his seeming the one most inclined to push into it, the pointed reminder of where it came from, this advocacy itself mildly disturbing: due to the fact that he had been foremost of the “formidably gifted” men whose probings with his impressive array of devices, along with Selmon’s interpretations both of them and of the two Russian-Frenchman reports, had helped teach us the actual conditions surely obtaining there. He spoke:
“Could we not at least give our identity, sir? If we were more forthcoming, perhaps . . .”
I interrupted that. “I would say where ‘forthcoming’ is concerned, it is up to them to set an example.”
I looked directly at the communications officer, and some sudden doubt having to do with him flashed through me. We waited in the silence. I gazed idly out the port on a slightly arousing sea through which we moved on our slow speed. Then Bainbridge simply dropped the place-name softly into the hush.
“Bosworth, Missouri.”
As said, it reverberated almost reverentially, as something iconlike; the words falling as into a stilled pool of water, rippling out in circles around the table, a quality almost hypnotic in it. I turned sharply to him.
“Mr. Bainbridge?”
“I don’t know, sir. The evidence runs against it—the mechanical nature of the transmissions. But somebody had to put the tape in place . . . Aaron here . . . ,” indicating Selmon, “mentioned the possibility of pockets which might get away free.” He turned to the radiation officer, in his voice almost a pleading tone.
The astonishment at this was that Bainbridge’s casting of doubt was at variance with his own previous opinions, an officer who had been as certain as any that nothing remained since his own beloved and almost godlike devices had raised nothing; coming from one whose opinions, judgments, in anything involving communications were, as stated, given the most special attention, this present reaction constituted a considerable breach. Finally Selmon answered, his dry tone at least forever unchanged; not a scrap of emotion there.
“That I did,” he said. “Pockets. I wouldn’t have picked the Global Communications Center at Bosworth for one of them that the Russians would leave in place. Obviously a bit of it left. I’d wager that everything that breathed in Bosworth went.”
“The message then?” Bainbridge said. “Someone’s breathing. And trying to tell us—tell anyone else that’s left—something. Maybe trying to bring the remaining ones into touch with one another. Tell us where others are, where the safe places are . . .”
Hearing Bainbridge, a solid, calm officer, seemingly invulnerable to fancy, one realized how close beneath the surface it lay; a captain’s alarm rising: With how many others might the case be the same? Selmon was unmoved.
“Then why don’t they tell it, Commander?”
“I don’t know,” Bainbridge said, his voice seeming to collapse, half in frustration, half in anger—at what one could not say.
From up above I could hear the first swelling of the wind, reaching into us through the opened ports, see out them the commencement of long rolling waves on the revealed seascape, the first whitecaps blossoming on the blackening waters, the wind setting the sea into a cross-swell, the ship into a mild rolling motion. I had interpreted it as emotion. And yet: It seemed something more. It was as though Bainbridge sensed something in the transmissions that he was unable or unwilling to convey—perhaps his own fresh doubts had not coalesced into actual conclusion; that he felt onto something, at present elusive as a ghost, was still reaching out to grasp it, extract its secret; each time its escaping him just as he held it in his hands. He was simply too sound an officer, too profoundly knowledgeable in his field, for any captain to dismiss this as foolish wish. We waited in the heavy, brooding silence which seemed to rest in the most murky, darksome of waters, visibility nonexistent. It was time to open it up.
“Well, then?” Deliberately I turned first to the CSO. I had come to a determination: I would not permit that recent confrontation in the night by the lifeline to prejudice me against his opinions. He was no fool. Nobody could become combat systems officer on a DDG and be that. I should listen to him. Aside from these judicious and somewhat pious reasons, there was another motive, devious as could be, full of cunning: If matters fell that way, and I had in the end to move against him, I wanted him to have the minimum of excuses for his actions. I wanted this: that he had had his say and that not just I, but the other officers as well, had rejected it; I wanted to isolate him; make him without allies. It was a perilous game for any ship’s captain to play. The CSO might in the process pick up allies himself. I felt it worth the risks; felt in any event that I had no choice.
“Mr. Chatham?” I said.
He shrugged. One knew at once: his position fixed, much strengthened now by that immense signal, whatever else you might say about it; his voice clipped, surer than ever, something of smugness in it.
“If we were wrong about Bosworth—not a soul here expected it—we could be wrong about a great deal else back there.”
He let that opening settle for a moment, then came on.
“Earlier we haven’t heard; ergo, nothing exists. Conveniently forgetting electromagnetic pulses knocking out all communications, any certain way of knowing. Simply no word: interpretation, nothing there. That has been the drill. Well, now we have heard.” He marched steadily on, putting one in mind of a prosecuting attorney in a courtroom, and a decidedly clever one. “If the conclusions based on those first deductions were correct—with respect, sir, I never believed they were—this changes everything. That signal from Bosworth changes everything. I favor this ship doing what I’ve always favored this ship doing. After that signal, I don’t see how anyone can come down on any other course. The fact it’s as cryptic as could be makes no difference. There has to be some reason for that. We’re never going to find it rattling around the Mediterranean. It has to be telling us something urgent, of the first importance. It’s an NCA, for God’s sake.”
I listened quietly, attentively, pressing everything back. The wind freshening, reaching into us like a lamentation, a distinct pitch now added to the ship’s roll. I could begin to hear the random tinkling of the spoons on the sides of coffee cups. Waiting a moment, in consideration of what had just been said, I then turned slightly in my chair.
“Mr. Selmon?”
“Well, sir, I suppose you could have the President of the United States—or at least the Chief of Naval Operations—or maybe a radioman third sitting there at Bosworth beeping out that signal. Come there, crawled there, God knows how, from God knows where. Whoever, if anybody, it is, not much in the way of brains left. Simply to keep repeating it. In fact that may explain it, be the clue. I’m thinking of those poor souls on the beaches. Maybe whoever it is in Bosworth has arrived at that condition. Sending out that mindless tape—no one who had the slightest power of reason remaining would do a thing like that. Maybe just telling us he’s alive. That would be a thing he would do. Well, that’s nice to hear.”
What some might have seen as cold-bloodedness I believed was an immovable dedication to the evidence; almost a revulsion at what he considered dangerous fantasies. I looked out a port: skies blackening with clouds to match the changing color of the sea below. I heard Selmon go on.
“Aside from that, it doesn’t alter a scratch our previous projections. If the objective is somehow to connect up with the human being, if there is one, or a thousand of them, holed up somehow in Bosworth, Missouri—though the reason for such an undertaking escapes me—how does anyone propose to get there? I don’t suppose, sir, you want me to go through all the reasons again. I would have thought we had them memorized by now. But once more, sir. That land is fully, absolutely, contaminated; it will accept no human being; it is untraversable.”
Chatham: “I consider that speculation; but let’s say it’s true. Then let us be absolutely certain on this one—by having a look. He’s obviously not receiving our reply.” He turned to Bainbridge. “Wouldn’t you say so, Lieutenant?”
“It would seem self-evident.”
One had to admire the closely reasoned argument the CSO was pursuing, as well as his subtle efforts to enlist allies as he went. He continued, pressing his advantage. “It’s not just Bosworth, Captain. It couldn’t be just Bosworth. That signal means there are almost to a certainty others not just in Bosworth—but other places back there, maybe many of them, maybe considerable numbers of people; unlucky enough not to have Bosworth’s global communications and so unable to tell anybody. So let’s go find out; at least get nearer to where maybe he can hear us. No, I’m not forgetting fuel. If the worst comes to the worst, and we truly can’t get ashore, there have to be fallback places. Bermuda. Caribbean islands. Some place down there. We can at least be near—waiting it out perhaps while the place clears up sufficiently to receive reconnoitering parties. I’d like to lead the first one.”
“There won’t be,” Selmon said flatly, as if he were correcting a pupil far out of his depth and not particularly bright anyhow—not one of the radiation officer’s more attractive traits, part of that generally increasing loftiness of manner that was coming to characterize him. It could put anybody’s back up, let alone Chatham, whose back went up pretty quickly as it was. He continued with something like weary patience. “We’ve gone into all this, but I’ll say it again: The winds, their cargo—the pattern of winds west to east will have taken out the last one of those islands. That’s flat; the last thing it is is hypothetical.”
“Mr. Selmon . . .” Chatham, his voice barely concealing disdain. “I wish I was as certain about visible things as you are about invisible ones.”
“Why, that’s the difference in our fields, Henry.” The radiation officer smiled distantly. His refusal to be made angry was one of his most formidable assets; the reaction of a slight but unmistakable condescension, as now, indeed sometimes prompting that emotion in others; his tone not much off the derisive with an officer considerably senior in rank to himself. “I’m sorry you don’t understand that some fields of knowledge—example, yours, weapons—by their nature deal with matters that are visible; others also by their nature—example, mine, radiation—with matters that are not. That difference doesn’t make either knowledge, or either field, the less viable.”
“Mr. Selmon, do you ever consider the possibility that you may be wrong?”
“All the time, Henry. What I’m really concerned about here is this capacity for make-believe. Bermuda, Lord deliver us.”
“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Selmon.”
“To what purpose would we go back there?” Selmon said, his habit being to ignore remarks of that sort except to bite back a bit, his voice a model of imperturbable rationality, his intent perhaps actually to provoke. “A little morbid curiosity?”
“Morbid curiosity? I have to call you on that, Mr. Selmon. I think it’s a despicable word to use.”
Chatham half rose from his chair. His face was a rage of purple.
“Now you listen to me, you superior prig. You call yourself a naval officer. You can’t stand a deck watch. You couldn’t begin to operate fire control. You couldn’t conn one of our small boats. I doubt if you can take a sextant bearing . . .”
“I can count radiation,” Selmon said quietly.
For a moment the CSO seemed about to leap across the table on Selmon. My hand hit the table, sending a jangling of saucers down the length of the table.
“Knock it off. Gentlemen,” I said more gently.
Everyone had a shorter fuse these days, and it seemed to grow shorter by the day. I waited now for the temperature to lower; listened to another voice: that of the sea beginning to assert itself, accompanied by distant thunder advancing. One waited, in all patience, one tried to penetrate the meanings of sentences, of murmured sounds; of words; of silences . . . It was the reports furnished us by the Russian submarine commander that had fissured, if only to a limited degree, our unspoken pact not to talk about what had happened, not to dwell on it; fearful that once we entered that darkness it would swallow us up, destroy in time, possibly sooner than later, the mental and emotional faculties we so nonnegotiably required to see us through; feeling now we could at least probe the edges of it; more than that, now needing to do so, always with restraint, in order to make the decisions on which time was running out. I knew there were questions waiting to be asked around that table, knew their nature. I dreaded them as much as did the questioners themselves, yet knew they had to ask them before they could even hope to think of where their own views would come down. I made way for it.
“Anyone,” I said. “Feel free to ask . . . anything . . .”
And so they began, as one knew they would, to inquire about their own hometowns, as if received knowledge might affect their personal preferences as to returning.
“Tulsa.” It was young Jennings. “Mr. Selmon, I don’t know why anyone would want to hit Tulsa.”
“Very probably no one did, Mike,” Selmon said.
“But you’re saying . . . Assuming it wasn’t hit . . . everything would be the same? The Galleria . . . Locust Park . . . the university . . . all of it would still be there?” Trailing off on a note half statement, half interrogation. “Just that there would be no people?”
“That’s about the size of it, Mike,” Selmon, who I am sure had never set foot in Tulsa, never heard of its mentioned charms, said gently. “Assuming, as you say, it didn’t rate a missile.” He hesitated, continued in uncharacteristically compassionate tones with the young officer, little more than a boy. “There may still be a few people—well, wandering around, scratching out.”
“Just waiting for it? Waiting to die.”
“Pretty much that,” Selmon said softly. “People have different tolerances to radiation sickness. Not that it makes any difference in the end.”
“Then I’d just as soon not see it. I don’t want to see Tulsa,” Jennings said almost fiercely.
We waited a moment, caught in that. “I’d say the luckiest ones were those with the lowest tolerances,” Lieutenant Thurlow said reflectively.
“If I had a choice,” Selmon said, “that would be mine in that situation.”
“Of course, the luckiest ones of all,” the navigator said, “were those smart enough to die immediately.”
Some of those who came from great cities or from obvious targets hardly bothered to ask any questions at all. Ensign Martin, our assistant communications officer—her home was New York City—didn’t say a word. Nor did Lieutenant Commander Coles, our operations officer, whose home was Norfolk; Lieutenant Polk, our weapons combat officer, who lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It was as though they had with great effort, at immense cost in pain, erected walls around themselves and were not to be fooled or tricked into dropping these expert fortifications for no purpose at all save to let insufferable pain in. But most of our officers were from more distant places, from the small towns of America. As the exchanges went on, it became evident that a higher measure of hope resided in these. Selmon did little to encourage them. The principal difference in the large cities and the small towns appeared to be that those in the former went instantly for the most part while those in the smaller ones were able to hold on until the fallout from the larger cities had reached them. Almost a philosophical question arose as to which were the more fortunate. Still, everyone seemed anxious to make a case for his own town.
“I’m sure everyone here has been made aware of the special glories of Big Spring, Texas,” Lieutenant (jg) Rollins said. “I’ve tried earnestly to do that. What would you say . . .”
The deck officer’s voice also trailed off. “Houston would have been a certain target,” Selmon said quietly. “NASA.”
“Big Spring’s four hundred miles away,” Rollins said, voice low, almost hopeful.
“Karen, I’m afraid that’s as much as next door with that fallout. We’ve seen with our own eyes an almost analogous situation. For Houston, read Naples. For Big Spring, read Amalfi. Went sometime back, I’m afraid. Texas: caught between the massive fallout from Houston in the eastern part of the state and from another certain target in the western part, Amarillo—all our nuclear devices were assembled there. Texas may have been the first state to go in entirety. In fact, that projection was made years ago in some of the internal studies. No one ever said much to the Texans about it that I can recall. The odd thing about it was that at that very time people were talking about getting away from the crowded eastern states, the big cities, to have a better chance—and some doing just that. Moving to places like Texas.”
“I get the picture,” Rollins said shortly, not wanting to hear more. “A big joke on Texas, wasn’t it?”
This went on for a while. The names of different states, different towns, cities, the names of home. Time seemed to stop as the names, some familiar, some not, fell around the table, a sense of nostalgia curiously combining all the antitheses, of affection and horror, of resignation and refusal to recognize what had happened, of acceptance and of denial of belief. The names falling hauntingly, cruelly, into the air, time forgotten, time remembered, while Selmon, with a gentleness and patience I had never seen in him, made his estimates, guesses, at the fate of each. It did not go along without his being challenged.
“You’re not saying that everybody in the country is gone, are you, Mr. Selmon?” Lieutenant Bartlett pressed him.
“No, sir,” Selmon said, his voice taking on more of his customary firmer tone. “I’ve never said that. I would be extremely surprised if that is the case.” But he was not to be budged from his central holding. “What I am saying is this: that that is true for the great majority of the population; that most of those remaining are in varying conditions, all on the downside—exactly the same kind of variations we saw at Amalfi, all along the northern Mediterranean beaches, in other words beyond any help; and that the smallest segment of all is pretty much untouched up to this point, at least so far, may or may not remain unaffected—putting figures to it, this last group to be counted in the thousands at the most. That is the evidence.”
“In the thousands? For the whole country?”
“In the thousands. And I personally wouldn’t guarantee that figure.”
Then Lieutenant Girard spoke up, her voice tranquil as ever yet seeming firmer than usual from one who generally knew her own mind.
“Mike’s right. I don’t want to see what it’s like there. Those people on the beaches at Amalfi . . . I don’t want to see them . . . in North Carolina . . . in Massachusetts . . . There are some things it is better not to see.”
“Nonsense.”
Startled, we looked down the table at the CSO. “We’re all missing the point.”
Lieutenant Commander Chatham spoke coldly, brutally, forcefully. “It’s not a question of what we want to see. It’s a question of needing to know. I mean absolutely know, the only way you can. We’ll never be satisfied if we don’t have a firsthand look. We could never live with ourselves.”
I saw it at once as an immensely cogent and appropriate argument, its strength felt immediately, bringing us all still. The next I found less so.
“It’s what the crew wants,” he said.
“The crew, Mr. Chatham?” Myself now feeling a flash of anger, my voice taking on its first edge; anger and alarm. “I hadn’t realized you’ve been polling the crew.”
He seemed at least a trifle abashed. “Not polling, sir. It’s a sense I have.”
“A sense, Mr. Chatham? I also was unaware that you had taken to testing the sense of the crew.” That warning in my voice, I decided not to pursue this little clash. “Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not discussing what the crew wants. We’re discussing what’s right for this ship to do.”
“Then, Captain, only one course is. This ship has a responsibility to go find out. She has a duty to do so.”
It was as if I were playing directly into his hands.
We waited in the merciless silence, in mute anguish at these thoughts of home, now first articulated, men torn, it seemed to me, as much as men could be, pulled two ways by forces each of which was so powerful that every soul around that table seemed in danger of being rended bodily apart. I turned then, no avoiding it, turned as always I must, as I was forever seeming to do, to Melville, the engineering officer, who had sat throughout silent as a shadow, letting the emotion play around him, taking no part, not even mentioning or inquiring about his own hometown of Charleston, refusing to move out of the one realm that was his, in which he kept himself isolated; waiting for us to come back to it, as he knew in the end we must; asked him and received the latest figures on our fuel reserves, depleted somewhat from the last calculations by our reconnoitering of the north African littoral. Inherent in all projections emergency reserve plus search time in the Pacific.
“Assuming straight home and back this time. Just to look. No reconnoitering.” I felt a certain desperation in my voice. “There and back—to right here. Total cruising time?”
The words had seemed to come from myself with a volition all their own; words I had not wanted to speak; felt immediately I should not have, their only effect to raise false hope, to leave the door open a crack. Chatham’s words stabbing my mind: Responsibility. Duty. Words sacred to a ship and to any sea captain. A flash of surprise crossed Melville’s face which never showed surprise; from the “there and back” obviously. Then the quick comprehension: We could not traverse Cape Horn, a matter previously settled. Slowly his head rose from his clipboard; his large brown eyes with so much white in them looking dead-on into mine.
“Thirty-four days, sir. There and back. Twelve-knot steaming.”
“Mr. Melville, take us through Suez. After the American trip.”
“Aye, sir.” Clipboard. A little longer at it, while we waited. I watched his hand move over it, the long black graceful fingers that made one think the word pianist. “Rough calculations here, sir. To Diego Garcia, thereabouts. Possibly beyond by a few hundred miles.”
“Never reaching the Pacific?”
“Well, we might reach it, using up reserves. Nothing left to look around for something when we got there.”
The cold known fact, stated, seemed to bring one’s heart still. I remembered: effectively, fetching up beyond the Horn one way; at Diego Garcia now the other. Removing in reality what in my innermost soul, not yet so much as alluded to, I was coming more and more to judge was our only hope. I asked what did not need to be asked of a man like my engineering officer. Making it with respect, something he would understand.
“No chance for error there, sir?”
“Captain, whatever else is hypothesis, that is not. There’s nothing hypothetical about our fuel supply.” The tone half sardonic, half apologetic, as if it were somehow his fault. Through the ascending sound of the sea I heard him say: “If we went the other way first, coming back, transiting Suez . . . well, sir, we’d end up, for all actual purposes, bobbing up and down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”
The words, quietly as speech could be spoken, absolutely professional; the engineering officer’s voice in its even cadence cast in those unedged Southern tones, this oddly making what he had to say the more deadly; the verdict falling knell-like in the silence of the wardroom. As if his end and sole obligation was not to favor or weigh but simply to present options to his captain; as if to say, I have performed my duty; now perform yours.
The sound of a rising wind, a gathering sea, came leaking through the ports; then from afar off, a single clap of thunder, like a siege gun. I sat, reflective, spoke in reflective tones, wanting that atmosphere for what I was about to say; wanting perhaps to point them gently toward that other hope.
“There have to be others. It is simply impossible that we are the only ones.” Turning again to him whose evaluations would seem to be the most authoritative on that subject. “Mr. Selmon?”
His own voice fell softly, caught in the quiet tone of assessment which had descended upon the wardroom.
“It has to be so, sir. To think we are the only ones would in my view be irrational. We’re just on the wrong part of the earth to find them. The Russian submarine, of course. Maybe a few others. But principally I would bet on the Pacific, that part of it in the southern hemisphere. The islands, I mean, not Australia, New Zealand, not any land masses—they all had targets, one kind of target or another, that one side or another had to take out. Islands that had nothing on them but a few people, too insignificant to merit extinction and clear of wind patterns passing over heavily targeted areas. Best bets of live human beings on those. In my view, a conclusion almost inescapable.”
“Mr. Bainbridge?”
“I’d accept that but add that there are clusters of live human beings above the equator and in the other hemisphere. Of course I’m thinking of the Bosworth signals. If there are some there, likely there are some in other places.”
“It’s all possible.” I sighed. “None of this is contradictory. Gatherings of people scattered around the globe. Some of them maybe in quite excellent health. Anyone disagree with that general assessment?”
I waited. No one spoke.
Abruptly, perhaps from feeling pushed against the wall, nowhere to turn, having to strike back myself, something hard and angered—by what I could not tell, perhaps only at the way things were—arose in me.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, there are probably a few people back home. In fact there’re probably a number of these ‘pockets’ scattered God knows where.” I spoke brutally. “We can’t simply go up and down the earth, looking for them. Not in the light of what Mr. Melville has just told us. Did everyone hear him? And if everyone did, is anyone suggesting we start some sort of fucking treasure hunt to find as many of those pockets as we can before our fuel runs out and we end up wallowing in some sea somewhere?”
“No, Captain,” Chatham said. “Only at home.”
I regretted already that outburst. “Gentlemen, ladies, I apologize to all of you for my language.”
I could hear the rain begin. We would never be satisfied unless we had a look. Yes, an immensely powerful argument. I had to give him that. But what would the price be? No man should be given that choice, no group of men. No, not even Navy men, in whose lexicon no words stood higher than the ones he had uttered. Duty. Responsibility. Then I heard Chatham, something insinuating and sly in his voice:
“Captain, there’s something that hasn’t been mentioned. The Bosworth NCA signal: It’s as much as an order to go home. By that very designation. National Command Authority—the highest. Using TSP ciphers. In addition to that, Navy people are obviously sending it, doing the transmitting. Navy message form. Navy code security procedures—changed every twenty-four-hour day. Just as the Navy does.”
He had come on stronger than I had ever known Chatham to do, and done so shrewdly, employing what seemed to be forceful evidence. Had come on also, I had to admit, with every sense of personal conviction in the right of what he was saying. But there was something more to come. A great deal more. He paused in the gathering silence, for all the world like the gunnery officer he was, waiting until his target came dead in the cross hairs. Then he let go.
“If we can’t take orders from the Navy—not to mention the National Command Authority—from whom, in God’s name, are we to take them? I don’t think it’s time for Navy ships, Navy officers, any Navy command whatsoever, to start disobeying Navy orders.”
So here it was, at last. Slowly my eyes came back from looking at the sea to looking point-blank down the table at the CSO. I became aware that a peculiar tenseness had invaded the wardroom, penetrated the last one of the officers, their eyes, all of them, looking up the table at me, expectant; every officer as aware as I was myself of the implications in his words: the first open questioning of my authority; not direct, but a manifest testing of the waters. A silence unlike any other held sway with something of fear and shock in it, something absolutely ominous. No sound save that of the augmenting rain drilling down into that atmosphere. How clever that was of him to save it until the last, like a surprise witness. Myself knowing that it was the last possible choice of a moment to seek confrontation; knowing as well that I must not altogether let it pass. I listened to the rain.
“There’s weather coming,” I said. “We have but a few moments. As to your point, Mr. Chatham, naturally the captain of this ship will decide whom, if anyone, we are to obey. All others need be concerned only with obeying him.”
“Of course, Captain. I meant only . . .”
I cut that off. “I think we’ve pursued the matter sufficiently for today, Mr. Chatham. You’ve made your various points.”
Somehow then looking down the length of the wardroom table to where those two always sat, mute, the Jesuit at its very end, facing me, the doc to his left, thinking I never knew what with either. I should mention that in these officers’ meetings, neither ever volunteered an opinion—each had to be explicitly asked for one; this not a peculiarity of theirs, rather the way of Navy chaplains, Navy doctors, their area of authority lying in healing, one physical the other spiritual, not in the decisions to be made as to the ship’s course and action, these matters the Navy in its wisdom reserving for officers of the line. Nevertheless, seeking counsel wherever it might be found, something making me ask.
“Doc?”
“I’m not sure it makes sense,” he said. “But I feel we have to go home.”
“Commander Cavendish?”
He waited a moment, a man who by vocation and choice heard far more words than he spoke, these always offered with the least of portentousness. “Not much, Captain. It seems pretty clear: the question, I mean, not the answer. Mr. Chatham speaks of duty, of responsibility. They’re the right words. I might suggest that we give more thought to what the fulfillment of those two really consists of, in our special circumstance . . .”
An immense scar of lightning flashed across the starboard port, the following thunder breaking directly above the ship, for a moment silencing all talk. In our special circumstance. The words striking into me with the quickness of the lightning flash, words entering me both as sword and as comforter . . . the weather had stopped him, or he had stopped anyhow. No time now to attend to them in any case. For suddenly I was paying heed to the ship. I looked now with intention through the ports upon a whitening sea; listened now not idly but with a seaman’s ear: The roll accompanied by a deepening pitch as she moved into the troughs, the ship slower in coming up. I glanced at Chatham, at Bainbridge, attempting to assess my own assessment of these two curiously allied officers. Together they were a considerably potent force in shaping the opinion, the sense, of the ship. Their motivation to my mind as far apart as could be. Bainbridge: simply innocent hope. Chatham: From whom are we to take orders. And the other: It’s what the crew wants. The two phrases seemed coupled, part of one thing, bringing altogether near the one terrible danger of all. Control of this ship: that was the missile officer’s intent, the sea herself seemed to speak to me, telling me so; secretively reserving any answer to that other question: to do what with? Not just to take her home: Nothing could convince me the intent stopped there. Control of her, her immense striking power: That was his every purpose. I came away from this. I must have felt that their position had to be given its every shot; we could not turn our back on it; not yet. I had the deepest fear of the consequences should I do that. Added to all this, surely, that long and almost unbearable talk of home. Almost helplessly I turned to the communications officer.
“Mr. Bainbridge,” I said. “Concerning Bosworth, Missouri, here it is. The wraps are off. You may identify ourselves, our position, tell them anything else you judge might elicit an intelligible response. Prepare and show me the messages. Starting right now. Get cracking.”
Even as I rose, from down both sides of the wardroom table, the officers of the USS Nathan James, heads turned, half of them right, half left, all, including Bainbridge, looking at me with the one expression of startlement, as if it were the last decision they expected from me. Then the communications officer found his voice, a miraculous lift in it.
“Aye, sir. Immediately, Captain.”
Almost as if synchronously, the elements let loose. A great blaze of lightning shot through the ports, filled the wardroom; the following thunder breaking close aboard. The ship shuddered through a sudden pitch, trembling and lurching as she moved into the valleys of the sea, the sound of wind and waves rising above the ventilation and machinery noise. Then, tired of waiting, the torrents of rain exploded and began to hammer the ship. Jennings, the junior officer, moved quickly to close the ports without being told to do so.
“I think the ship needs us,” I said, rising. “Let’s batten down.”
* * *
I listened to that plaintive sound, forever mysterious and poignant to sailors, of rain falling into the sea, quietly now, haunting as chords in a requiem; the mists hanging low in the water, visibility no more than a couple of ship’s lengths; the ship seeming to move through a void of nothingness; now and then a low soughing of wind as from sentient beings emerging from the spectral darkness. I looked up: masthead and range lights barely penetrating the haze. I had stayed for the changing of the watch; stepped then from the pilot house onto the starboard bridge wing for this final captain’s check, after the strong weather we had been through over the past hours, before making below for my bunk.
The day had seemed forever, the emotion of the wardroom lingering, heart still rended by what my officers had had to be put through, the thoughts of home from that stronghold box where they had so long resided in silent agony ever since the launching in the Barents now forced brutally into the open; each officer forced at last to think, in considering our decision, of his own hometown, what it might be like there, was anyone alive in any one of them, was one of these a wife, a daughter, a son . . . a father, mother, sisters, brothers . . . if so, what might be their condition . . . torment added upon torment until at last the intolerable memories, thoughts, feelings, the whole great horror was stuffed almost violently back into its locker. Not all achieving this success. Later, walking along the passageway in officers’ country to my cabin, I had heard from behind two closed stateroom doors the sounds of sobbing; hesitated, hand almost coming up to knock softly; continued on. Chatham had spoken well into that awful tide of remembrance; his argument had every worth argument could have: We would never be satisfied until we had seen it with our own eyes. It was wisdom itself; the words, once uttered, became something like a commandment, engraved in stone, haunting the mind. As for myself, I had no one to go home to, not any longer, and quite often I had felt that this constituted my chief strength. I was not at all certain I would have possessed the courage of my own officers, having others—wives, children—back there and yet with every fortitude carrying on, fulfilling their duties. A wave of the most intense respect and affection for them held me for a moment in the night. Who could now blame them if they came down on Chatham’s side? To go see with their own eyes; even, as the Jesuit had said a time back, if it meant seeing the nail prints in the hands, the spear wound in the side. Who was I, lacking their motivation, their desire like the passion of the Lord, to oppose them? The thought seemed to lead directly to what the Jesuit had said this day.
It had happened so quickly, filtered even so through arriving weather, the sudden realization that the ship was signaling her need for us in her battle with the sea . . . so quickly that only blurred impressions remained as evidence. Said what he had said, stopped there. But I felt I heard it as much as if he had said it directly into my ears. Himself knowing that he did not need to do that in any detail, knowing that a mere signal would suffice; knowing the fact to be long deep as could be in me, buried beyond the reach of any Fathometer, any determination as to the matter lying after all across far seas, thoughts as to it easily postponable, other urgent decisions daily upon one . . . his knowing also, and this the intent of that signal lest by any chance I miss it, that now something vital to it had arrived—we could not do both, not fulfill both obligations, duties. That was what he was saying. The choice as to direction the ship would take for the first time forcing those other competing considerations up into realms of consciousness, terrible and impermissible thoughts, one wanted to scream to them to go away, thoughts not fair to thrust upon any man, least of all upon a ship’s captain who did not want them, a mere mortal, who had crushing in upon him enough other insistences to test all his capabilities, this being the last ever to be one of them. Even the Jesuit, surely morally the bravest of men, pausing as in some sort of cowardice, and of fright, before them, the words unwilling to come off his tongue, managing only those two it seemed everyone was mouthing. Duty. Responsibility. And I knew: His concept of those two words had nothing whatever to do with Chatham’s about going home. God’s will, he might have added—though he seldom used such expressions—if something, the weather or his own fears, had not halted him from saying the other. We have the means. Who else for sure that we know of does? I would never have added that codicil of his, having ceased to believe in such words, such expressions as—God; in such phrases as “the higher purpose” I had heard him use, if only once or twice. They were not for me, not any longer; other than that, knowing, and for the first time, that the Jesuit’s unspoken question was in all truth the real question I must now decide; not wives, children, brothers, sisters, at best their corpses perhaps to see, at worst replications of those half-living half-dead beings, creatures, wretches, no nomenclature as yet having been invented for them, their species being so new, first seen on the beaches of Amalfi; our just fate surely not to go see those now on the beaches of Virginia and the Carolinas, of Massachusetts and Maine; not to go back and in some form of suttee, throw ourselves on their funeral pyre. I remembered now that single time, when with a strange, seemingly offhand lightness that later I was to look upon as almost eerie, he had said, “Naturally these men are under my spiritual care . . .” A single beat of a pause: “. . . these women.” From any ship’s captain’s point of view, ship’s company being the correct designation, the last seeming utterly unnecessary, even offensive: Why these women? As though some new category, meriting an extra measure of that care; a distinction for the same eternal reason unacceptable. For a moment I forced the matter, despite my tremblings, into direct thought. Phraseology different, coming at it from polarly opposite bearings, Jesuit and myself, our objective: Could it have been more identical? Did it not have to be? The single consideration before which every other purpose, hope or desire had to give way? Was anything else thinkable? Any truth existent other than that nothing on earth be permitted to stand in the way of it, least of all the relatively inconsequential opinions or trifling desires of men that we go this way or that? Standing alone in the night, I knew it for the first time, in a kind of Damascene clarity, forced in that light myself to embrace it as our sole purpose; feeling the pale rain falling on me. And felt an absolute terror. Not believing any longer in God, it was as though I had become God myself. The final decision now almost easily made, as I suppose decisions are for God. I would give Bosworth until Suez, with our own new forthrightness, to tell us something besides gibberish: by that time also the southern shore of the Mediterranean having given us by then its own final answer as to habitability. If negative on both, assemble the men.
I turned out of the rain, passed through the pilot house, exchanged a pleasantry with Lieutenant Sedgwick, the OOD, and made my way below to my bunk; feeling utter calm, falling into instant sleep, the rain heard but as a soothing patter on the weather surfaces of the ship all around me.