William Brinkley: The Last Ship

“I know you’re not, Doc. About the aspirin. Here’s the word. Starting now, give it to a man only if you’re personally convinced his head will fall off in your lap if you don’t. Then only a couple. Under those conditions, how long will the aspirin last?”

“Seven… eight months. Depending on falling heads.”

I glanced again at the list of medical supplies. “I want a daily report on my desk at zero eight hundred of all medicine used the day before. Including aspirin. That plus the binnacle list.”

I waited a moment, made it casual, offhand. “The women. Anything special?”

Nothing of surprise reached his expression. Nothing would. Only that bland look of his, a hardly perceptible shrug of nonchalance, of what-do-you-know.

“Only this. Their health in every category—physical, mental, emotional—continues clearly better than the men’s.”

“How the hell do you account for that?”

He paused. “I don’t understand it myself. Of course these are exceptional women. The Navy saw to that. Especially those sent to sea. But that couldn’t explain it all. It has to be something else.”

He gave that soft grin. I had had a problem separating when the doc was being serious and when he was not until I came to learn that, in one shading or another, he was always being the former.

“Maybe it’s that women can get along without men a damn sight better than men can get along without women. And the fact that they know it. That alone gives them a big edge. In endurance, in whatever you want to call it. They know they’ll win out in the end.”

“Nobody is going to win out on this ship.” I could hear the rather brusque edge in my voice.

“I was not predicting that, sir; only speaking of women in general terms. Home truths.”

I looked into those eyes that, also, told nothing. Yet suddenly I knew full well that he knew it as I did—knew to the last intimacy what I was thinking, and would speak it aloud no more than would I. Neither dared, both feared to do so. We could only dance around it. It may have been right there and then that I first made a distinction. I did it without really thinking of what it meant, its significance, save perhaps the instinctive thought of numbers, the visceral protection in any ship’s captain of what is in short supply.

“About the aspirin,” I said. “Belay the rule for women. Give them what you think best.”

Both of us waited a long moment more, our eyes locked, expectant. I felt I was looking into ancient pools of blue full of knowledge, and of a sudden apprehension that must be given language. But there came only a quiet, almost humorous, “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

Finally, I needed Selmon’s reading, my RO. I always did.

I had had chow, then stepped topside. The sun had crossed over and blazed down violently on a silent sea, pale blue merging with a synonymous sky to form a seamless horizon, a single vast and monochromatic universe, unoccupied by so much as a cloud, a bird. I scanned both ways. No sign of Silva to seaward. He must have gone far out in his search but I was not uneasy. He knew the sea, reserved for it the ultimate in respect, and was not the man to test it unduly; knew small boats, and the water lay in glassy unmenacing repose, free of the slightest swell. Neither did the other direction give any sign of Delaney and Thurlow, who remained swallowed up in the island, which sat in sultry virescent silence beyond the glimmering lagoon, seeming a thing of eyes looking at us quite as much as we continued to look at it. I could see off-watch men standing about the decks, turned toward it in gazes of uncertain wariness. It was as though some sort of reluctant spell, attempting to overcome suspicions on both sides and to reach some sort of accommodation, were developing between the ship and the island. I alerted a lookout to tell me of the approach of either of our emissaries to land or sea, then went to my cabin. Melville and Selmon were standing just outside. We went in and I shut the door.

“Could it reach here?”

We sat in calm reflection. I spoke to the slightly built, wan-appearing young officer without whose consent we did nothing. Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, I thought. He possessed that Jewishness which is quietly confident of its superiority of intellect, by the same token far too smart to let his knowledge of the fact show through, realizing that to do so throws away half its power. No officer aboard had so ascended in importance.

“It could,” he said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think it will, Captain. I don’t think the winds will bring it. Not with the westerly flow this time of year. We’ve got four months before the winds shift, the northerly currents begin…” He hesitated. “If the schedule holds, if something has not happened to throw off that, even… By then I calculate most of it will have settled wherever it’s made up its mind to settle.”

The winds, I thought. They now govern everything. I thought of a phrase from Milton: the felon winds.

“Unless it’s added to,” Selmon added judiciously. “That seems so improbable that… Wouldn’t you say, sir?”

“I can’t imagine who would do it. But if either of those two unlikelihoods happened—or both…”

The Navy taught you to figure out what was least likely to happen, and the worst thing that could, then count on it. He seemed almost to be speaking to himself.

“If there was still some left four months down the line; or if it had been added to; and came the shift of the winds…”

He stopped, needing to say no more. I looked at him and said quietly, “Girard and I were doing the great inventory today. I was a tailor at one point. The idea was to alter our Barents clothing, somehow adapt it, to present latitude.”

Selmon permitted himself a soft smile; memory taking him, I imagine, nearly a hundred degrees of parallel north from where the ship now lay at anchor to seas as bleak and fierce as earth held, gales of Beaufort 7 chronic, weatherdeck watches so thickly bundled only eyes showed, waters so appalling a hand overboard—it happened twice with us—would be claimed by the cold even before the sea could take him; from there back to this serene equatorial domain, these pale azures, ruled by the sun, with its own ferocity. The matter hung in the air as fully as if it had been stated. Were we to see the cold again, this time at the other end of latitude? The radiation officer had returned to that thoughtful, fully concentrated expression that was his manner at any proposed course.

“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I would. Not just yet. I’d leave Barents clothing as is. Wait and see, I’d say, sir.”

“Wait and see,” I repeated tonelessly.

He said: “If those things happened—or even one of them… There would be nothing to do but run before it. Get as far south in latitude as possible. And it might be necessary to go all the way. As conclusive as one can be in these matters, I can’t believe it would ever reach there. Certainly it would be the last to go.”

We had gone over it all, times without number; stopped always by, How did you exist there? I let the silence hold a moment; then turned my head fractionally; spoke to the hardest, coldest fact of all, bringing everything inside oneself to a kind of chill of finality: two months of running time left on the nuclear reactor cores containing the highly enriched uranium fuel which propelled the ship.

“Mr. Melville,” I said. “We can go to Antarctica and back. Or we can go home, all the way, and back. Not both. Or: we can navigate Antarctica there and back; go home; but could not then return. Is all of that correct?”

“Affirmative, sir,” the engineering officer said. “I’ve worked it out practically to the mile, Captain. All figures being calculated on slow-steaming basis. Not above twelve knots.”