So it was that; I could not have understood better what he, to be sure in his Jesuitical way, was getting at. I returned his own tone.
“What an interesting way to put it. Yes, I recall those helpful strictures. What you said is the case. You were perfectly right. I’ve been at sea most of my life, as I pointed out. I don’t know women, that’s true. I couldn’t be more aware of that regrettable deficiency in my character. But I think I know human beings reasonably well; not from possessing any especially percipient powers myself, but simply from being longtime a sailor and a sea captain; shipboard life I’ve always felt exposes every strength and every weakness present in a man in a way no other life does. You will forgive these banal reflections, Chaplain, while I’m sure agreeing with them.” I found myself actually enjoying this wonderful speech. “And if you’ll allow a novice’s observation, I’m not at all convinced there are all that many differences, aside from the obvious one. In fact I have grave doubts as to some of those that have been for so long alleged. I remember one in Henry James, otherwise a great favorite of mine. You familiar with James, Chaplain?”
“Intimately.”
“James says somewhere, ‘A woman in any situation is an incalculable factor.’ Pronunciamentos like that—so facile, so fashionable for so long, many of them propagated I have a notion by women themselves: I am deeply suspicious of them. Take that one, for instance: I have seen no evidence of it. I haven’t found it so, differences, in sailors—women sailors; almost indistinguishable from men sailors, I would say, in our ship’s company at least, in all the qualities that count: dependability in doing a job, courage, thoughtfulness as to shipmates, their sailor’s word good as any man’s.”
“Do you know what you’re overlooking, Captain?”
“No. But I’m sure you are about to tell me.”
“The women will presently cease to be sailors. They will commence being women.”
The cawing of the birds, returning from sea, fussing stridently at us for daring to park so near their nests, startled us, silencing all else, all human intercourse. Just as well. The truth was, I not just understood his presentiments, his forebodings, and where they were directed; I in considerable part harbored them myself. I was fearful, perhaps in a way only another sea captain could have understood, that to admit these conjectures into the realm of potential validity would be to increase the likelihood of bringing them about; myself absolutely convinced that above all the women must be given every chance. We had come very near. I was grateful to the birds. I started to stand up.
“Time to climb down. Oh, by the way. As to that other matter . . . the question of reproduction,” I said, as simply as that. “I’ve decided. That also I will leave to the women.”
His answer, so assured, surprised me. “Captain, I shall be perfectly content with that. Tom.”
Something in his voice. He had turned facing me.
“I think the time has come to tell you something that might not show up in my service record. Have you ever wondered how I got here?”
His tone was quiet, unemotional. I said: “As a matter of fact I have. Now and then.”
He gave a small, wry laugh. “Because of what we’ve been talking about. The women. One woman in fact. A student of mine, of all banal things. The Church knows how to handle such matters. Put temptation beyond reach.”
I spoke as quietly. “How odd. The thought had crossed my mind a couple of times. I don’t know why. Perhaps . . . men who like women and whom women like: I always thought you could tell.”
He laughed softly again. “I don’t know about that. The irony, of course, was that the impressment to the fleet was arranged before there were women on ships. The Navy played a trick on the Church.”
“I’m immensely glad. Tom, I don’t have the slightest idea why you’re telling me this. It doesn’t make a particle of difference in anything, of course. Besides, celibacy in priests: I never had a strong position on that.”
“I had. I have.”
I decided to put it straight. “Will you participate in whatever the arrangement turns out to be?”
“Not in a thousand years. Can we get along now?”
As we rose, he suddenly seemed to wobble on his feet, teetering straight in the direction of the cliff’s edge, feet away. My arm flung out, seizing him around the waist. I had a glimpse over his body of the huge jagged rocks seeming to reach up to us from their clusters far below . . . yanked him back, our two bodies collapsing together closer than I would have liked to the cliff’s edge. We crawled back, myself half pulling him. We straightened up.
“My God, Tom. Are you all right?”
I was shaking; he seemed as calm as if celebrating Mass.
“I’m fine. I don’t know what that was. A sudden dizziness. Maybe we sat too long.”
This was ridiculous: He was in much too good shape to have been affected by that.
“You haven’t been ill, have you?”
“Nonsense. I’m the best man on this island.”
“I’m going to check with the doc.”
“Feel free to do so,” he said, almost curtly.
I looked out and over that prodigious drop; scary. “Christ, we could have both gone over.” I glanced down at the rocks. “Not even a chance to swim away. There are better ways to go.”
He laughed shortly. “Sorry, Captain. I wouldn’t have wanted to take you with me. I feel very bad about this. All the same, thanks for grabbing me.”
The thing was, he didn’t seem to feel bad at all. He seemed to find it almost comical. I was more than irritated.
“I guess there are tropical angels,” I said. “Let’s go down.”
As we came down the hill the island’s gentle rain made its daily appearance and we stood under the trees and waited for it to finish. I had not realized we had been so long away.
“I wonder if He’s made up His mind.”
He had spoken as if to himself. I turned sharply in the eerie shadows, uncertain of what I had heard.
“What?”
“Assuming the women go along—I feel perfectly confident as to that, Captain, you’ll see . . . women want babies . . . I was thinking of the problem you mentioned . . . Whether we are in truth to be the last . . . or . . .” Light and shadow seemed to flicker across his face in the darksome surroundings where we stood . . . It was almost as though those embowered shadows had become a chapel, freeing him up to use religious terminology he felt it would be excessively pious to employ outside of churchly walls . . . “if we have others present in us . . . That will be the true and only test, won’t it . . . of what we’ve been talking about . . . your most interesting proposition, hypothesis . . . whether man was a mistake or not . . . Yes, I wonder if He’s made up His mind. Whether to give us a second chance.”
For a moment I somehow connected all of this with the incident on the cliff’s edge which at this moment seemed to take on a mystery of its own in my mind, something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I looked at his face as best I could make it out in this darkness at midday and could just discern his distant smile and—if I was not mistaken as to any appraisals in these moments—a curious—an astonishing—zeal, close to fervor, that made me feel a quiver of foreboding. Then, to my infinite gratitude, the twenty minutes—they had seemed far longer—were up, the rain had finished for the day, the bright sunlight returned, all dappled down through the trees, setting the drops of water glistening like pearls on the virescent leaves. I felt a decided shakiness inside, as though I had returned from another world. We stepped out of the trees into the sunlight and made our way back to the settlement.
All of these things I pondered. Not least, the near miss on the high cliffs. It was almost as if something had pulled him toward the cliff’s edge, almost pushed him. Dismissing that as instant nonsense. Not least of the dangers that continued to confront one these days, I reflected, reading things into things.
3
The Keys
I felt the hand shaking me, w
as instantly aware and alert. I recognized the lookout messenger Dillon. Behind her through the open door I could see the earliest blush of first light.
“Sir. Billy believes he’s raised a ship on the horizon.”
I scrambled into trousers and shoes. Moving fast out of the cabin, passing Dillon, following close behind me, now beginning to run, scrambling up the high ladder to stand alongside Barker. The last stars paled in the sky, taking their leave, and first light, borne on a pink glow that spread across the horizon, was just beginning to announce a new day over the vast and, to the naked eye, empty sea. Barker’s long lean form was still bent to the Big Eyes and by the way he was moving the instrument within a close, small arc, I was made aware that whatever it was he had seen, he did not of a certainty see it now. Still scanning over that arc he spoke.
“Bearing zero eight five, she was, Captain.”
He stood aside and I bent and came hard on to that fix. I looked for some time more; then swung the instrument each way, tracking twenty degrees or more in either direction. Came back to zero eight five bearing, looked some more. Then straightened up.
“Was,” I said.
“Zero eight five, sir,” Barker repeated firmly. “No mistaking. A ship.”
I had never known him to be in error on such a matter. He might not always be able to identify the object but if he saw something on the sea, something was there. I stood a moment watching him, looking up into those eyes with all their unblemished frankness, then turning to look out over the island’s treetops in that direction. I could make out the morning star, oddly itself on the approximate bearing on which Barker had fixed his sighting. The sun was beginning to climb the sky, bringing daylight to the unsurprised sea. Meantime he bent and looked again through the oversize binoculars.
“All right, Billy,” I said.
He straightened up.
“What did she look like?” I said.
“Sir, I had her in range about a minute.” He paused. I spoke with a touch of impatience.
“Yes, yes.”
“First light. It was hard to see clear. But she was there. I swear it, Captain. Smack against the horizon line.”
“You don’t have to swear it, son,” I said softly. “Just tell me.”
“I would have said maybe a destroyer, like us. But a fair size longer. Definitely not a merchantman. I could make out guns—maybe they were missile launchers. At that distance . . .” Yes, at that distance you could probably not make out the difference . . . “man-of-war. No doubt about that. Then she was gone. Maybe she dived.”
“Dived?”
“A sub. Maybe she was a submarine.”
Something jumped in me.
“Captain, I know. There was a ship there.”
“Yes, Billy,” I said quietly. “Well, she isn’t there now.”
I started to climb down; turned.
“Anything about color . . . shade?”
“Color, sir? Well, of course, any ship looks pretty dark on the horizon. If anything, I’d say she looked, well, more than usual anyhow . . . black. Very black.”
I turned back and climbed down.
If it had been anyone else I would have dismissed it as a mirage. We were big on mirages these days. Particularly of ships. Most of us, myself included, had imagined at one time or another that we had seen ships out there, far on the horizon. Seaman Barker had never had one such false sighting while on Lookout Tower duty.
And so I reflected. Subs know they can be least seen at first and last light—classically, for that reason, that is when they launch torpedoes. One wishing not to be seen would have his best chance then. She might not have figured eyes like Barker’s.
* * *
I think it was Barker’s sighting, whether actual or hallucinatory, that forced the matter to my mind: It was not inconceivable that the time might arrive when we should have to protect ourselves, this lovely uncontaminated island, which offered so much in the way of fecundity and habitability and to which we were adding so distinctively by our own efforts; it was just possible we might have to defend it against others who might raise it on the horizon, take a look at these exceeding virtues, and desire to have it for themselves. It was a finite chance. But nothing is more drilled into a naval officer than to prepare oneself and one’s ship for the event he is most certain will never happen. This in turn made it now seem almost incredible to me that I had not only done nothing about but had almost forgotten something else: the two keys that were necessary to accomplish the launching of the missiles. I now found it a shocking thing that I had left my key in a place I would go days on end without visiting—the captain’s cabin aboard the Nathan James. To be sure, in what would seem to be a secure place, a safe to which only I had the combination. Still, it was a matter of the most fundamental naval doctrine that the key, given the power of these weapons, never be in a location which its custodian did not inhabit on almost a continuous basis. I had been guilty of gross neglect of duty—if there had been anyone there to execute it, palpably a court-martial offense. All of this would surely be true as well of the other key, now in the custody of Lieutenant Girard, our CSO since Lieutenant Commander Chatham’s departure; her key, I knew, kept in Chatham’s old safe there, only herself holding the combination.
Now the matter suddenly became urgent in my mind: It must be corrected at once. That same day of the sighting I called Girard to my cliffside cabin; explained the situation.
“I want it set straight today, by both of us. And something else.”
I explained my feeling that Barker’s sighting, real or not, raised a concern of possible attack from the sea, in which immediate action would be required. We now kept a very minimum of crew aboard.
“I want a gunnery crew aboard ship. A small one—but continuous, permanent. Enough to man the five-inch gun, the Harpoon, and the Phalanx in a GQ situation while the rest of us are getting in the boats and boarding ship. How many men?”
She figured for a moment. “Fourteen would be able to take action, open fire, while the others got aboard.”
“Then see to it. Take the necessary men from the Farm, fishing, carpentry details.”
“Aye, sir. Will do at once.”
“Something else. We’re also going to need some kind of General Quarters alarm system here on the island. Bring the launch GQ system off the ship and set it up for battery operation. Install it on The Tower. Everyone in the settlement area could hear it, if we need to get aboard ship fast, get the ship underway. Leaves only the Farm across the island. The sound wouldn’t reach there. We’ll have to use lifeboat radios from the ship. Send one to the Farm, mount the other on the Tower. Keep a radio watch on the Farm.”
“That would work,” Girard said.
“I’ll get Thurlow on it. Now. About the missile keys. I want each of us to visit the ship today, each remove his key, put it somewhere on the island very close at hand. Since we have no ‘safes’ here, neither of us is to tell the other where that place is.”
“Of course, sir,” she said, understanding immediately. “I’ll see to it.” She had risen to go do so when I detained her.
“Miss Girard?”
“Sir?”
Even before Barker’s sighting had suggested the present unacceptable location of the keys—weeks ago, in fact—another matter respecting them had occurred to me which I also put away in the concentration on island business in what now seemed clearly an additional negligence of duty. Now it, too, had come surging up in my mind as a matter equally urgent to that of the keys themselves. While we were on the subject, it seemed the time to attend to it as well.
“If anything should happen to me—or to you . . . or to both of us . . . we should have backups . . . Otherwise, if somehow they were needed, the missiles would just be sitting there . . . no one able to launch them . . . The missiles would be locked in . . . forever . . . Are there two persons you and I could both trust? One for each key . . . one person each of us could tell where on the island, what exact place
, his key is; how to get at it if that unforeseen thing happened . . . to myself, to you, to both of us. Each of them, of course, like ourselves, not to tell the other the location of the key in his charge. So that neither could get to both keys. Same arrangement as between ourselves. Each, without any reservation whatever, trustworthy; no problem in keeping his mouth shut.”
“That’s a big transfer of power, Captain.” She seemed to have a doubt.
“So it is. But the alternative is worse. Missiles frozen in.”
That phrase seemed to get through. She reflected a bit.
“I suppose we have to do it,” she said, still not at all eager.
We both pondered.
“Thurlow,” I said. “A natural, as exec. The other?”
“Delaney? A missile chief.”
“A natural choice. Thurlow and Delaney then?”
“Fine with me, Captain.”
“You have a preference?”
“Not much. Delaney.”
“Then I’ll take Thurlow.” It seemed a random thing. “I want the three of you to run through the launch drill. Next couple of days.”
“Aye, sir. I’ll lay it on.”
She rose to go. “I’ll see to the gunnery watch. Right now, if that’s all, I think I’ll go to the ship, get my key, put it—someplace.”
“I’ll go with you.”
Together, we took a boat out. I went to my cabin, she to Chatham’s old stateroom; each got his key, we came back. She went about her business, I mine. Myself first hiding my key in what I felt was an appropriate place, herself I knew doing the same. I sent for Thurlow, set him to the job of removing the launch GQ and two of the lifeboat radios from the ship to the Lookout Tower and establishing a continuous radio watch between the Tower and the Farm. Next I summoned Delaney and Thurlow, together, to my cabin ashore, and having explained the circumstance, that the secret as to the location of the respective keys was to be that of each alone, neither telling the other, under the same terms as existed between myself and Girard, sent Delaney to seek her out and to be told the location of her key, Thurlow remaining behind. I took him outside and showed him where I had hidden my key, near my cabin. After a bit we all came back. I wanted it got absolutely straight: no one else in ship’s company to know the slightest thing about this transaction. Girard and Thurlow left. I kept Delaney back to tell him about the gunnery crew I had ordered Girard to set up aboard ship.
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