CHAPTER 22

As though it had been waiting for them to get their orders, the wind continued to rise and the ice pack freed them. Somehow Paul was becoming more and more superstitious, omen-seeking, full of dire premonitions. Blood on the ice, the wanton killing of the bears and the rape of the mother had been a very bad sign, and the willingness of the elements to let them go south after refusing them permission to go north for so long seemed part of a dark design. Mowrey’s rapid decline to a trembling alcoholic seemed an even worse part of some inscrutable scheme for the destruction of the ship and all aboard her.

As he stood on the flying bridge piloting the ship through the broadening leads of the ice floe, Paul suffered more and more from a sense of doom. He had learned to love the strength of the trawler, her blunt power and ability to twist and turn as nimbly as a racing sloop, but the Nanmak had been a twin sister, and now, no doubt, she was lying a hundred or more fathoms below the icy surface of the seas, and crabs were probably feasting on the bodies of the men who had been trapped in the engineroom. The three-inch gun on the bow of the Arluk and the twenty-millimeters reminded Paul that their exact counterparts had failed to save the Nanmak, and were now pointing at fishes.

When Paul stepped into Mowrey’s cabin to keep the listless old pilot informed of the progress of the ship, he recalled Hansen’s cabin, the same compartment exactly, but all fixed up with curtains on the ports, the sword over the bunk, a sheepskin rug on the sole, a painting of Greenland, a print of an Arctic hawk, and a picture of his handsome wife on the bulkhead. Now the dark, sullen currents of the North Atlantic were ebbing and flowing in that cabin. Hansen’s body would not be there, he would have been on the bridge in any kind of action. If he had been killed by gunfire, he might have been smashed to bits, or perhaps his body had been blown clear of the ship and was floating now in the ice floe, bloated and swollen, food for the gulls and sharks.

Paul’s fists tightened. He was, he realized, even more angry than he was afraid. What was the point of sending a lightly armed trawler against the big guns of one or more German weather ships? Wasn’t the United States supposed to be the most powerful industrial and military nation in the world?

The theory of sending a small ship to spot the enemy for planes sounded fine, but in the fogs of summer and the darkness of winter, planes were usually useless over the Greenland ice floe. And how could he, with no training at all and only five months of experience, outwit the Germans, who had at least made war their national business?…

It did not take the Arluk long to go back to Upernavik and put the Danes ashore with the Eskimo carpenters. As the deck force unloaded the lumber which had been intended for the weather station. Paul remembered the old phrase, “clear the decks for action.” The crew worked fast and uncomplainingly. A rumor had started, or a possibility that was being fantasized into a conviction, that the Nanmak had sunk, but her crew might, indeed probably had escaped to make camp on an iceberg, where they were now awaiting help. Such things had often happened in the Arctic, Seth said. It was much more comforting to think of themselves as engaged in a heroic rescue mission than hurying to replace a dead ship as a target.

After leaving Upernavik, Paul headed for the open sea. As they left the shelter of the ice pack, the ship reared like a startled stallion. Steadying on her southward course, she continued to buck and roll, but the whistling wind on her stern gave her a speed of nine knots, fast for her. Nathan and half the crew were sick again. Paul felt queasy, but his fear and anger gave him both strength and control. Now that Mowrey rarely left his bunk, the men were depending on him, and he could not afford to look weak. Although he had to make a few quick runs to the head, Paul was able to give up his bucket and look confident on the bridge.

One thing a ship’s officer cannot afford to be is honest, he realized with a sense of shock. He could not admit to the crew that he had never been more afraid in his life, not only of the Germans, but of the ice on the east coast, which was reputed to be much worse than here, and of the endless Arctic night, which would soon descend upon them. In Boston Mowrey had said that Headquarters had planned to bring the trawlers home before winter, but there had been no recent talk of that. With the Nanmak missing and one or more German icebreakers prowling the east coast, every ship available would be kept on station.

Constant daylight had been eerie. What would it be like to try to navigate in constant darkness? There were no radio beacons on the east coast and without radar the ship would be blind. Even the fathometer had stopped working. While bucking their way through the ice, they apparently had knocked off the metal dome on the bottom which transmitted its signals. The gyrocompass was becoming erratic, and although Nathan found ways to fix it, the machine had lost its aura of infallibility. There, practically on top of the magnetic North Pole, the magnetic compasses spun in bewilderment. What was he supposed to use to find his way through the black months in the ice—blind hope and intuition?

Perhaps the knowledge of the terrors ahead was what made Mowrey step up his drinking so much. As they rolled south, there was an hour of darkness at midnight. Mowrey celebrated it by climbing unsteadily to the flying bridge with a bottle of Southern Comfort which he no longer bothered to conceal. Straining through the gloom to keep watch for icebergs, he sang softly to himself, “One-Eyed Riley, One-Eyed Riley, Oh what a man was One-Eyed Riley.…”

For the next twenty-four hours Mowrey slept in his bunk, his slumber so deep that Paul listened carefully to make sure he was breathing. At noon he got up and prowled the decks, raising hell with Boats when he found that a painter of the new whaleboat had a frayed end. When Boats whipped it, Mowrey said, “Jesus Christ, didn’t anybody ever teach you marlinspike seamanship? Bring me the ditty bag.”

Squatting on the deck like the old boatswain he was, Mowrey fitted his hand to the leather palm, waxed his thread, poked it through the eye of the big sailmaker’s needle with shaking fingers, and put a whipping on the line that was as handsome and intricate as embroidery. When Boats and the seamen admired his handiwork, he went on and whipped the ends of all the signal halyards, but for the third day he didn’t even bother to ask Paul to show him the position of the ship on the chart.

That night Mowrey was sick and vomited in his bunk, not because of the violent motion of the ship, but because of too many sweet cordials. Paul did not want the crew to see their captain this way, so with towels and buckets of water he cleaned up the old man.

For a long time Paul had admired Mowrey, hated him and pitied him, all at the same time, but as he washed his uniform and blankets, he found himself just hating him. What right did a captain have to destroy himself at sea while constantly stressing the need for discipline in order to survive? And what right did the damn government have to enlist men and send them into battle aboard a fishboat with a crazy alcoholic for a captain? How was he, at the age of twenty-two, supposed to make up for all these errors?

Anger sustained him more than hope. After changing his own uniform, he took star sights. In the new twilight he could for the first time in months see the stars and the horizon at the same time. He had to leaf through two books to identify the stars and the unfamiliar tables of logarithms puzzled him for an hour, but his lines of position crossed in a tiny triangle which gave him a precise position. Nathan was better than he at the mathematics of navigation, but he had not yet learned the delicate art of bouncing a faint star on a dim horizon with the mirrors of the sextant. It was necessary for Paul to remind himself that after all, Nathan did keep the gyrocompass going for the time being at least.

When it came to celestial navigation, Seth was even more helpless than Nathan. As a warrant boatswain he was not expected to be an expert with a sextant, but how could the man have spent a lifetime at sea without bothering to learn to find his way around? Neither the Arctic nor the Germans could be expected to forgive ignorance. What, Paul wondered, would all these men do if he got sick, fell overboard, or decided to take a drink himself?

The sensation of being indispensable was frightening, but not entirely painful. It was better, at least, than feeling useless, as Nathan did, and as Paul had for so long.

As the ship neared Narsarssuak, where they would refuel for the final journey to the east coast, Paul wondered what he should do about Mowrey. If Paul complained to the operations officer about him, the base doctor would examine him and send him to a hospital. With the good fitness reports Mowrey had written under duress, Paul probably would be made captain and Nathan would be made executive officer. A completely inexperienced ensign would be sent aboard to be communications officer, and the ship could sail off to face battle in the long Arctic night without one man aboard who really knew what the hell he was doing.

The thought of this made Paul sweat, despite the cold north wind on the bridge. If he had a real sense of responsibility toward the men and a strong enough desire for survival, he should tell the operations officer that after no training and only five months of sea duty, he did not consider himself capable of commanding a ship headed for Arctic battle. No doubt the big brass would respect him for such an honest assessment of his own abilities, and would assign some experienced ice pilot to command the ship. He might not turn out to be a drunk, but probably he would ride Paul’s ass and make himself as insufferable with young reserve officers as most old sea dogs did. The thrill of his newfound independence of spirit would be gone and again he’d have to live in fear of bad fitness reports and withstand constant insult. And if the new captain proved to be full of more bluster than common sense, a not unlikely prospect, the ship might not be much safer than under his own command. Paul was aware that he still didn’t know much, but he was at least beginning to have some confidence in his own ability to learn.

Of course a third course of action was possible, perhaps the easiest of all. He would do nothing about Mowrey, revel in loyalty to him, remain actively in command of the ship, but profit from Mowrey’s experience during the old man’s sober moments. True, Mowrey would probably become more and more of a problem as his disease progressed, but by the time he finally sank into total oblivion, Paul might have had a chance to absorb a little more of his knowledge. Somehow it always appeared safer to do nothing, to leave his life in the hands of fate. If he had pushed hard enough to have himself transferred to Hansen’s ship, after all, he would be dead.…

The north wind increased during the ten days it took them to reach the mouth of Narsarssuak Fjord. Paul had never really been to sea in a howling Arctic gale, and he was relieved to discover that both he and the ship could endure it without even a great sense of danger. Paul’s stomach still would hold no food but hot bouillon and crackers with a little chocolate, but there was no more convulsive heaving, and he was strong enough to remain on the bridge almost all the time, napping as he sat on the stool, but alert enough to awake instantly when there was any change in the motion of the ship or the sound of the wind.

Although the wooden hull of the Arluk creaked and complained as she rolled her scuppers under, she always managed to rise to each mountain of water which rolled up astern and when she went rollercoastering into the great valleys of the sea, her blunt bow always rose triumphantly without burying the three-inch gun in more than foam. The heavy diesel engine rumbled without missing a beat, and enough men remained on their feet to man the controls and to keep lookouts on the gun deck and the flying bridge.

The acrobatic performance of the heavy trawler in the rolling seas would have been astonishing if it had been brief, but after a few days Paul began to take the ship’s ability to survive for granted. He felt quite safe as he sat wedged into a corner of the bridge on his stool, which had been lashed to the bulkhead. The hissing steam radiators kept the bridge warm and the ports unfogged, even when the lookout on the gun deck was clapping his mittened hands together to maintain circulation, and cowering in the lee of a canvas-covered 20-millimeter gun.

Paul did not realize at first that the snugness of the bridge could foster a dangerously false sense of security. One night, during the brief hour of darkness, he was napping on his stool while Nathan, who had the watch, clung to a stanchion near the wheel, the wire handle of his galvanized bucket looped over his arm, his gaunt face like a mask of tragedy in the dim light from the binnacle. The roar of the seas and the wind outside had not changed in pitch for days, and therefore Paul was aware of it only when he had to shout to give orders to the helmsman. It had been more than eighteen hours since he had stretched out in his bunk and his eyelids felt heavy, but his hard stool felt curiously comfortable, and the hissing radiators warmed the bulkhead against which his back rested. As he dozed, his chin rested against the bulge of his parka, and sometimes he fell into a deep sleep for as much as fifteen minutes before starting and staring out the porthole into the darkness ahead. Little could be seen. Low-scudding clouds obscured the stars and a new moon, and there was only the dimly luminous flash of a breaking sea to prove that the glass in the porthole had not been painted black. Although he might as well have been blind, Paul was not unduly worried. In Greenland there at least was small chance of meeting other ships, and he had steered twenty miles to the west of the ice pack before turning south. While he dozed he dreamed of women, as he almost always did, of the few girls he had known before his marriage, of Sylvia, and disturbingly of late, of fat Hilda, who had had the redeeming grace of wanting him so much.

Suddenly something woke Paul up. He never knew what it was: a change in the motion of the ship, some new sound, or even divine intervention, but he came abruptly from a deep sleep to full alertness, stared through the port, saw a flash of white in the black sea ahead, and before he was even sure what it was, shouted, “Right full rudder!”

When the sleepy helmsman reacted slowly, Paul grabbed the wheel and frantically spun it with all his strength. Turning her side to the seas, the ship rolled almost on her beams ends. Losing his grip on the stanchion, Nathan fell, his bucket clattering on the deck, and the helmsman reeled against a bulkhead. Paul held the bucking wheel hard over until the ship rounded into the sea, where she plunged her bow through the crests, throwing cascades over the well deck. Nathan was pulling himself to his feet, hanging onto the engineroom telegraph. When Paul said, “Ahead slow,” he adjusted the handle before the helmsman could reach it.

“Ahead slow,” he gasped as the bell sounded. “What the hell is going on?”

Without answering, Paul opened the door of the bridge, pushing it against the wind with all his strength. Standing there he could clearly see the iceberg, so close and so big that it towered like a mountain above the ship. On the windward side of its base, where the ship would have hit it, the great seas crashed, sending spray fifty feet in the air, and there was a hollow booming sound. The ship had missed it by not more than a hundred yards. Her turning circle and momentum had, with the rush of the wind, brought them abeam of the monster, which now lay only about three hundred yards away, not far enough if there was an underlying wedge of ice.

“Left full rudder,” Paul said, coming to glance at the compass. “Steady on three-zero-zero.”

“Steady on three-zero-zero,” the helmsman repeated. “Did you see anything, sir?”

“Lord God,” Nathan said. He was standing at the open door staring at the iceberg, which was slowly receding into the night.

“Nathan, get the lookouts on the gun deck and the flying bridge in here.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Forgetting his pail, which continued to roll on the floor, he went out the door, his long arms seeking handholds. Paul picked up the clattering bucket, carried it to the wing of the bridge, and heaved it into the sea, much as Mowrey might have done, he didn’t realize until later. When he returned to the bridge, Mowrey himself was standing in the open door to his cabin, unshaven and dressed only in his long gray underwear.

“What the hell is going on?”

“We almost hit an iceberg,” Paul said. “Go back to your bunk, skipper.”

“You been going ahead full. You got to slow down when the visibility is bad. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

“I have now, skipper. Go to bed.”

Grumbling, Mowrey shut the door. Soon Nathan came back, followed by the two lookouts. They all had been drenched by spray.

“Did you men see that berg?” Paul asked quietly.

“After you turned,” one lookout said, and the other stayed silent.

“Nathan, you were the watch officer, and you two guys were the lookouts on duty. You fucked up. If I hadn’t seen that berg in time, we would all be dead now because for whatever reason, you three men were not performing well enough to stay alive. There’s nothing I can say to you that could make you feel worse than the knowledge of your own inadequacy ought to make you feel. Now go below. Nathan, send Seth and two lookouts who can stay awake up here.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry!”

“I know you are. So?”

“I’ll do better!” Nathan said and went below, his gaunt body bent against the wind.

“Tell Cookie to bring me a cup of coffee!” Paul called after him, and Nathan gave a small wave of acknowledgment.

When they were safely away from the iceberg, Paul went back to his southerly course, but he proceeded at slow speed until the first streaks of dawn allowed him to see a thousand yards ahead.

“Sir,” the helmsman said, “maybe the Nanmak hit a berg like that. Maybe the Krauts didn’t get her at all.”

“Maybe.”

“Could we have got off on the berg if we had hit?”

“Not in this weather.”

“If there had been less wind and sea?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for us, holed up on some berg.”

“Maybe,” Paul repeated. “Mind your helm there. Don’t let her yaw.”

The excitement of the emergency had been almost pleasurable for Paul, but as he reached out for the coffee which Cookie brought to him, his hand was shaking so much that he spilled a little. They had come within only a few seconds of death, and had survived only by luck, of by divine guidance if one could believe in that. In the months ahead, how many more such emergencies would arise, and how long would it be before the law of averages killed them?

Paul’s brain had long been aware of danger, but for the first time his heart now felt it enough to race. Death. On such a ship on such a mission with such a crew, death was a near certainty in the near future. If Hansen, with a lifetime of experience in the Arctic, had been unable to survive in summer, what chance would Paul have in winter?

Death. The prospect of it did not fill Paul with as much self-pity as fury. Damn it, he hadn’t yet had time for hardly any life at all! Twenty-two damn years, and the first ten of them he remembered hardly at all. The twelve years he did remember had been pretty well loused up by the Depression, the constant scramble for money and by legions of people, starting with his mother, who had kept yelling orders at him. In his present mood of depression, he felt that in his whole damn life, he could remember only about twenty good days. Loving Sylvia had been full of the pleasure of anticipation, but when he came right down to it, they had really not had many good nights.

The thing that made Paul angriest was the realization that throughout his brief so-called youth he had remained so stupidly chaste. Among his set at Boston University, he had enjoyed a raffish reputation, if only because he had married so astonishingly early, but the horrible truth was that in his whole life, he had bedded precisely three women, including his wife. One of these had been a crazy drunken girl who had been laying practically everyone at a fraternity party and the other had been a Radcliffe girl who said she loved him, but whom he had abandoned for Sylvia. His damned obsession with Sylvia, since the time she was sixteen years old, had robbed him of what should have been the best days of his short life. And marriage had not turned out to be the long sexual revel he had imagined it to be. A lot of it had been that mysterious tension and fights.

Since leaving Boston, Paul had fallen into the habit of romanticizing his marriage with Sylvia and his whole past. He had dwelt lovingly upon the few good nights he and Sylvia had spent aboard the Valkyrie, a great climax to the sunny summers of longing for her. The bitter realization that most of his marriage and his entire youth had been one long exercise in frustration had the curious effect of making death easier to face. When he forced himself to be “realistic,” it seemed as though his life probably would have continued to be fairly lousy, even if there had never been a war. His dream of sailing his family’s rotten old yawl around the world obviously had been a no-go from the start. Instead of doing that, he doubtlessly would have taken a job in his father-in-law’s bank, moved into the little white house in the suburbs which Sylvia so craved, and divided his life between shuffling papers in an office and raking leaves at home. All the men he knew ended up like that, except his father, who sat at home carving wooden chains and puffing cigar smoke into his furnace. Terrific.

So … if life was all that rotten, what was so bad about dying young? This was certainly a revolutionary thought for him, but there was at least a kind of peace in it, relief from the violent rebellion he felt whenever he considered his dismal future. The trouble was, the contentment of this theory didn’t last long. If he lowered his guard for a moment, memories of the way Sylvia looked when she stood in the sunlight streaming through the window by her bed possessed his mind, and he hated the thought of death so much that he began thinking of ways to evade it. If the government was crazy enough to contrive for him a doomed situation aboard a fishboat on the east coast of Greenland in winter, why accept his fate with such dumb passivity? If he put a bullet in his foot while practicing with one of the .45 automatics which the government had issued to all the officers aboard the Arluk, he would be transferred to a hospital and soon released from the service. Probably no one would even contend that his injury was not an accident, but there were less painful ways to earn release. He could, for instance, tell Mowrey that he loved him and wanted to go to bed with him. Christ, the old ice pilot would be sure to put up a fine howl about that, provided he didn’t immediately take him up on the proposal, Paul thought with a sudden shock of intuition.… Less drastically, he could plead chronic seasickness to the point of disability and get shore duty, where his promotions would probably come faster than to men at sea.

Except he couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that, Paul realized with a kind of surprise. Why? He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that the destiny of the United States depended on his personal bravery. A history instructor at college had once said that no nation has a much better record of morality than any other. If police records were kept on nations, every country on earth would be counted a murderer and a thief. The Germans and the Japs had not been good boys lately, but they had killed fewer people over the centuries than the Russian czars, the English kings, and the Chinese warlords, who hadn’t been butchering other people much lately because they had been too busy butchering each other. If America’s record was better, despite the complaints of Indians, Negroes and Mexicans, it was at least partly because her history was comparatively short, the very young instructor of history had said to his very young class. At the time Paul had been shocked and surprised that he could not refute the argument very well. He had been more shocked when the instructor had claimed that modern wars brought no benefit at all to the men who actually fought them, whether they won or lost. Almost all the men who rushed from their farms or factories to defend their country, he said, went back to poverty if they were lucky enough to live through a war, no matter what victories had been theirs. The rich, even in those countries which lost, soon found ways to recover their fortunes. The mystery was, the instructor had said, why, in view of this dismal history, governments often found it so easy to get men to fight. He’d said that since men fight without realistic hope of profit, and usually with no cause that could be shown morally superior to any other—not the case, Paul felt now—they must fight simply because they like fighting. Men can pretend to fight for a religion or a country they can persuade themselves to believe is morally superior to all others, despite the testimony of history, but men don’t make up such elaborate excuses to do something they don’t really want to do, he’d claimed. It would be more reasonable to say that one should mine coal, till the soil or labor on an assembly line for the benefit of a religion or a country, but men won’t do work like that unless they’re sure of immediate profit. For fighting other men, any excuse will do. Since man has evolved from those animals which outfought all the others, the all-knowing twenty-five-year-old instructor had concluded, this should surprise no one. The only question was whether or when man’s mind and spirit could overcome his inherited instincts.

The class had argued indignantly with the instructor, but no one had been too convincing. Still, even while admitting that he maybe was right, Paul had hated the man and had wondered why he seemed so tense, so shifty-eyed and aggressive, as though he more than anyone was aching for a brawl. Why, after all, did the instructor turn his own classroom into a battlefield where no one ever talked quietly, calmly …?

Thinking of all this aboard the Arluk, Paul couldn’t persuade himself of much historic significance. But although his own people were of German stock and he had liked the few Germans he had met, he honestly did hate the Nazis, and Hitler with his murderous, irrational persecution of the Jews and anyone else who didn’t agree with him. As for the Japs, they’d bombed Pearl Harbor, and whatever their self-styled historical necessity, Paul felt personally attacked and wanted to fight them as much as he had wanted to fight boys who punched him when he was little. Maybe … the Arctic bred fantasy … he was just a natural-born fighting man, the inevitable descendant of the great fanged apes, the Vikings and all those German ancestors of his. Well, anyway, he enjoyed learning to fight the Arctic successfully. Although his months in the Coast Guard had not been exactly idyllic, he was suddenly sure that he had enjoyed them more than he would have liked learning the ropes as a banker. He liked, even loved, the spectacular coasts of Greenland, and no doubt would love seeing any place new to him. He liked learning to earn the respect of other men and of himself—maybe that was the key to it. Self-respect had never been handed to him—he had to earn it every day of his life.…

Whether this was good or bad, Paul did not know, but it was an interesting discovery. Another interesting discovery started as only a suspicion, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that at heart he didn’t mind, maybe even was eager for an opportunity to fight the Nazis, the Japs, whoever was the enemy. The idea of fighting had a certain fascination—it was only the idea of losing that he didn’t like, losing, being wounded and killed. Winning, he was convinced, would be marvelous, despite the fact that he would, almost without doubt, have to return to the same sort of dull job which would have been his lot if no war had rescued him. Winning, even without profit and without lasting honor, was good enough for him as an end in itself. At least for now.

Paul wondered whether he should be ashamed of this, but he was usually content with any truths he could discover about himself, finding morality enough in facing them squarely. The only trouble with discovering that winning was an end in itself for him was that it made him angrier than ever at those nameless authorities who had put him in a situation where it was almost impossible for him to win. Sending a trawler to fight German icebreakers on the east coast of Greenland was almost like sending a lightweight boxer into a room full of heavyweights.

Somewhere Paul had read that there were two great dangers in war: one was underestimating the enemy and the other was overestimating him. Some general had said that, maybe Sherman, who had said that war is hell. Certainly Paul had not underestimated the Germans. Was he right in assuming that they had many huge icebreakers on the east coast of Greenland?

Mowrey had said that when they captured Norway and Denmark, the Germans would have come into possession of many big icebreakers with experienced crews, but they had the whole of northern Europe to patrol and their resources must be stretched thin. Despite their need for weather reports, the east coast of Greenland could not seem all that important to them. Their army had already stalled in Russia, England showed no sign of giving in, and the Nazis must, at long last, be getting through their thick heads the fact that in the long run, the United States would be a deadly enemy. Those German generals who remained in possession of their senses must be beginning to see that their defeat was inevitable. Soon they would start drawing in their claws, concentrating their resources closer to home. Maybe they would forget all about the east coast of Greenland, except for sending an occasional plane over for weather reports.

All very sensible, and sooner or later it might even happen that way, but in the meanwhile, one powerful German weather ship had been sunk due to the sheer good luck of having clear skies and a flight of Lightnings overhead. The air on the east coast of Greenland was alive with German radio signals, whether or not some came from decoys, and the Nanmak was missing. No one, not even Paul the fighting man, could say that the Germans were not at least to be feared on the east coast during the approaching winter. If they were really desperate in the face of approaching defeat, that could make them all the more dangerous. It was somehow worse, Paul felt, to be killed by the last strike of a dying snake than to die fighting a whole nest of vipers.

In the midst of all these, as he realized, rather pompous philosophical musings, Paul was interrupted by Cookie, who loudly promised to shit in Boats’s soup if that worthy didn’t back up his authority over the seamen who were assigned to galley chores.

“When I say a man should be punished for doing a lousy job, Boats should do something to him. He just put a damn sailor who can’t even get a plate clean, up for promotion!”

“What’s the man’s name?”

“Blake. He breaks more dishes than he washes. He does it on purpose to get out of the galley.”

“Tell Blake and all the others that they’ll need your recommendation for any promotion.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Cookie said, touching his chef’s hat with his forefinger, and happily returned to his galley.

Back to reality, hero, Paul told himself.