“Would you like to go back to that duty, Gunner—or stay with the Farm? You’ve got it running so well I think they could manage without you.”
He grinned. “Not a doubt in the world about that, Captain.” He seemed to ponder the choice. “Well, sir, now that you mention it, I have kind of missed the gunnery and the ship, looking after the missiles. If it’s all the same to you I think I’d like to be back aboard for a spell.”
“I’ll tell Lieutenant Girard,” I said.
We lingered, comfortable with each other, looking out at the sea.
“Those damn things,” I suddenly said. “Those bloody useless things. Sometimes it seems like we’re spending our lives caring for them, doesn’t it?”
“Well, Captain, if it were my choice . . . May I be frank, sir?”
“Chief, I seem to remember you always have been.”
“Sir, I would have deactivated them and sent them to the Greenland Ice Cap long ago.”
I simply stared at him, startled by a memory. Once I had considered doing exactly that, back in the Mediterranean; stopped either by a captain’s inbuilt resistance to that act of castration, conditions elsewhere not so well known then as now; stopped also by the awareness that it would have been the last thing the then CSO Chatham, without whose consent and cooperation there was no way the missiles could be removed physically from the ship, would ever have agreed to. But now we had a new CSO. I was just as certain that, although in my mind holding the same right of refusal as had always existed under the dual-key system, she would do whatever I decided in the matter; indeed, its being by no means uncertain but that she exactly shared Delaney’s opinion. For the moment I stalled.
“There might be someone on the Greenland Ice Cap,” I said.
“Just a manner of speaking, sir.” He grinned again. “Let me study on it and see if I can come up with another place. Maybe Kingdom Come, as we say in the Ozarks.”
4
The Arrangement
I had had my separate quarters placed nearest the sea of any of the structures, extending from it a small porch or deck one could almost think of as the bridge of a ship, looking as it did almost straight down into the sea and from this vaulting clifftop vast to the horizon. Looking almost straight down also on the Nathan James, which I had brought for anchorage to this safer, leeward side of the island. On occasion the presence of the ship had come curiously to frighten me—an enigma seeming somehow connected with her power, her missiles, only twelve of the original number expended, though why this attribute, her having always possessed it, should suddenly become a source of disturbance in the mind baffled me. In any case this experience was rare. More often, to look down at her strengthened me, as now; perhaps as embodiment of all we had been through, survived; visible testimony, therefore, that we could survive anything that fate, never giving up, might still have in store for us. Looking at the ship, I thought again how God or that very two-handed fate, as one might have it, had shone on her ship’s company. I could not have imagined that things should have gone so well for us.
Perhaps I was summoning these thoughts to fortify myself now that we had come at last to the brink of a great unknown, the issues harboring the highest prospects of peril: the matter of the women; the matter of governance. How were the men to share the women? How was ship’s company to govern themselves? The former in particular: Its resolution, or the failure of one, I had come to feel, would in the end make us rise or fall, fail or succeed, turn this island into a working and satisfying community, even just possibly a fragment of paradise; or, tearing our ship’s company apart, turn it into . . . it did not bear thinking about.
I looked once more across the sea, a slight haze blurring the horizon; an impregnable void, I sometimes thought, an uncrossable barrier; the sea up a little today, its voice heard lunging against the shore far below. I could see thin strips of foam here and there, replicas of the cirrus clouds which streaked the blue above; a slight and benevolent wind driving them across the crests of languorous waves; a certain throbbing of the waters felt; the wind playing a murmuring song in the leaves of the tall trees, on the island green all around me. Both ways, up and down the island, the sunlight struck the red cliffs in a dazzling splendor. I looked down at the ship. I could see her communications antennas high on the mainmast, the radio shack still on the twenty-four-hour manned watch, kept with all the old regularity, never abandoned; so long since it had picked up anything of any kind, even the Russian submarine sometime back vanished from its various bands.
It was the day on which she was to bring me the women’s decision, their terms. I stepped inside.
* * *
Waiting for her to come, my thoughts coalesced around her and the women, and the crucial matter of what their relationship to the men in ship’s company was to be. During our time on the island, even as we sat there in our old way, going over supply and morale matters in general, in our accustomed fashion, as time moved, as we awaited the decision of the women, due on completion of the settlement, it was as though my sovereign authority was being subtracted from me in the exact same measure as hers increased. I think we both must have been conscious of a single fact more than of any other, the one fact that neither of us would ever so much as allude to in its inexorability but which seemed to permeate not just us but the settlement itself, ever augmenting, in a profound suffusion which in the sure sense of the most fundamental change about to manifest itself took on the aspect of something in equal parts obsessively awaited, mysteriously feared: the power the women were coming to have over us.
It was impossible for me not to feel a certain amount of resentment at this, however inevitable the fact, unreasonable as it might be in the circumstance of there being no fault of the women in trying to obtain power. I even sometimes thought, quite irrationally, how dare they do this, bring in their femaleness? But of course they had not brought in anything. They didn’t have to. It was there, that power, just by their being here. Though surely with their supreme if unexpressed cognition of what in the end rules the lives of men. Power simply from the fact of being female and in desperate supply; above all—when that phrase crept through the staunchest of barriers one erected against the very idea from the fact of its awareness tending somehow to bring on the most terrifying of emotions—of just possibly being, insofar as we knew, the last women; the reminder of the phrase seeming to invoke a feeling so totally antipodal as to send an invisible tremor through one’s whole being; that far from being objects of resentment they must now be lodestars of the most extreme care, the fiercest protection; that perhaps we were to fall on our knees and worship these creatures; as if God had been discarded, substituted for by women.
Knowing that to allow such thoughts into consciousness—even if they were based on rational considerations—itself would tend to distort, warp, even immobilize the new relationships we were even now undertaking to install, my mind descended, to preserve its balance, even its reason, from these lofty heights, to wondering, speculating almost idly, sitting there waiting for her: What was the thinking of the women? Surely they had to like the power. Not to do so would be to violate human nature, more specifically certainly womanly nature, even I, no authority, literally a beginner in the subject, at least that much knew. Yes, my mind let itself—made itself—descend almost brutally from these elevated postulations to come down to earth. Speaking sexually, did they look forward to that one aspect that was inevitable whatever the arrangement turned out to be, or were they seized with the most solemn trepidations, even horror? Were they overcome with delight at the prospect of such vast power, or dreading that sure price of the fulfillment of it? The fact that I had not the slightest idea of the answers to these presumably all-vital questions telling me how little I was into the minds of women; how abysmal my ignorance as to their inner drives, their mainsprings, their true needs, requirements; and most appallingly of all, as to the extent in which these might vary, woman to woman. Should I ask of her at least some of these questions
, the more specific and, suddenly now, surely urgent and enormously practical ones? Certainly not, I told myself at once. It was the last thing I should so much as dream of doing. Assuredly not those questions, and probably not any other. I should stay out of it, according to my original intention, which I now viewed as immeasurably wise, let them work it out to the finest detail, not so much as touch it.
Nevertheless, one question especially had nagged at me from the moment the Jesuit had first raised it in our dialogue by the cliffside: his report that some of ship’s company were beginning to have “moral” reservations as to the arrangement now being devised, correctly certain that whatever it turned out to be in its details, it would have profound and fundamental differences to anything they had known. Myself hugely aware, as of an extreme navigational peril seen dead ahead of a ship, that any serious division of the settlement into “moral” and “immoral” groups would be fraught with the most dread possibilities . . . I had wished to get from her the information as to whether any women were included in those having such caveats. I dared not ask even that, such a question perhaps more than any other certain to be considered by her a breach of my promise, my decision, to leave the matter to them, the women. I must stick to course: Unless she herself brought these considerations up . . . asked for advice . . . presented mere suggestions as concerned arrangements . . . perhaps I should stay out of it even then.
In fact, she had come to me, not a few days back, and then, without my asking for it, and indeed surprised, almost startled, to hear her doing so, began to give me an interim report.
The truth was, besides all the sundry philosophical reasons just given, I did not really want to hear what discussions the women were having; what various, perhaps myriad alternative plans they were considering, evaluating. She appeared to feel differently—up to a point. To want to discuss it within limits—her limits. Perhaps simply to get another, and a man’s, thinking, as I had so often hers in transposed situations. When she spoke it was almost as if our roles had been reversed, that she was the captain and I a trusted subordinate to whom she was accustomed to turn as a sounding-board for various ideas under her authoritarian consideration. She spoke to the subject abruptly—no preparation, no leading up to it, no transition. But also as matter-of-factly as if she were discussing some routine, if important, decision as to any other matter involving ship’s company—daily inspections, liberty rotation. Calm, seamanlike as could be, she was into it before I could stop her.
“I think as many plans have been suggested as there are women,” she said, in the tones of a naval briefing. “Our discussions are very free. We are getting close. We are considering every possible . . .” She hesitated. “. . . Arrangement. There are difficulties . . . One woman says she will have no part of it.”
“Her name?” It shot out of me.
“Coxswain Meyer.”
“Any special reason?”
“Billy. Seaman Barker. They want themselves for themselves.”
“I understand.”
“Well, I don’t. It’s completely unacceptable, of course.” She spoke forcefully, the aura of authority palpable around her. “If we’re to allow such a thing we might as well forget the whole business we’re trying to work out. It’s difficult enough without that.” Her voice turned sardonic—and instructive. “I’m afraid falling in love is going to be the first thing forbidden. If we allow one . . . none of this will work.”
All this concerned the women, and that part of it I had of my own volition surrendered as far as any control was concerned: all left to them. Yet, before I could stop myself, sheer curiosity barreled me along.
“Does any one woman have the option to refuse to participate at all?”
“We are deliberating that principle. Of course I have explained to them quite diligently that if one does so, it means that . . . that many more . . . for the rest of them . . . One suggestion was . . .”
“Lieutenant,” I said rather sharply, coming to my senses, appalled that I had let myself get this far into it. “I do not want to hear another word.”
A rather pleasing thought had suddenly occurred to me. It was not a new principle. Responsibility. I as captain lived under it incessantly. It was high time they realized there were two sides to this business of power. I spoke distinctly.
“You—the women—are to decide all these questions among yourselves. As previously arranged.”
“Aye, sir. I was only answering the captain’s questions.” Quite briskly.
I took the reproof. “I was in error to ask them. I will not do so again. Do not tell me about it. Tell me only what you have decided—when.”
“Aye, sir. We will meet your deadline.”
“Four days?”
“Four days, sir.”
“If you require more time I can extend.”
“Four days will be adequate, sir. We will have our decision within four days. We are very near already.”
Just before she went, seeming an afterthought:
“Oh, by the way, sir. No word on the Russians?”
“Not for six months now.” I repeated what I had already kept her informed of, bringing her up to date after we emerged from the dark and the cold. “Not since that point off Karsavina. As you know, repeated attempts to raise them on the arranged frequency—and on many others. No replies. Lost at sea, presumably . . . we’ll never know.”
“And yet you’re having that extra dormitory built. It would just about house Pushkin’s ship’s company.”
She missed nothing. I smiled. “Just in case. Nothing lost. If not the Russians, the space shouldn’t go wasted.”
Not missing that, either.
“How farsighted,” she said briefly, returned: “Other than—one would hope they are not lost . . . but as to coming here . . . Just as well, I suppose. It would have complicated matters.”
Unspoken the phrase, “especially for the women.” Their never having been specified in my talks with the Russian captain as part of the agreement—its being equally obvious that they could scarcely not be. I hesitated a moment, uncertain of whether to say it; then, despite its vast uncertainty, its perhaps irrational premise, I felt I had a moral obligation to do so, her being privy to the arrangement with the Russian commander; also important to say it in that I needed someone to say it to, for a response to a perhaps bizarre idea, specifically, to test it.
“You know that ship Billy thought he sighted?”
The word of that had spread quickly through the settlement.
“Yes, sir?”
“I even had the idea it might have been the Russian.”
“My God. Doing what?”
“Who knows? Approaching just enough to have a look at us. Disappears. Dives. For the time being. All this at first light, his best chance of not being seen while seeing us. Reconnoitering us.”
She looked astonished. “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. One gets ideas. Perhaps he has in mind to sink the James. Easy to do with her just sitting there, skeleton crew aboard. You don’t have to look at me as if I’d gone round the bend, Miss Girard.”
“No, sir. I’m just trying to grasp the idea.”
“I don’t really believe it,” I said quietly, “in case you’re worried about me. But we can’t afford . . . in our situation . . . to disbelieve anything until we’re shown otherwise, can we? If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that.”
“Aye, sir, there’s a truth.” I could sense her actually coming around more at least to the possibility, however remote . . . examining it.
“When I was on the Tower I had a moment’s thought of sending the ship to search for him. Decided no. It would leave the island undefended. He could just come in.”
“And do what?”
“As to that . . . one can only speculate: Here’s a working, functioning island. The only known habitable space. The Farm, the settlement, good fishing. All the needs of man. All ready for someone to move in.”
“
But, sir, as I understood the deal, we promised to share all of this with him anyway—in exchange for the fuel.”
“What if he couldn’t get the fuel, and he came anyway? He might then think we wouldn’t share. Or: Why share if you can have it all? This island’s also got women. These are all mere conjectures, Miss Girard. Normal paranoia for a ship’s captain. I’ll see you in four days.”
* * *
As she began, and even as I attended with all my faculties to what she had come to say, in some separate part of my mind I began a process that in all of our many sessions together had never truly occurred: I observed her. Objectively so, almost as I might appraise a painting in some gallery. Aspects, some of which I naturally had been unavoidably aware of, as would have the most unobservant of persons, but now taking on manifest forms as I actively assessed them as discrete facets of her personality, her being; her mental and especially physical self (a painting being a physical thing). She conveyed a remarkably felicitous physical presence; she was cool and gleaming. A narrow, lanky racehorse figure; yet, I suspected what the French call fausse maigre. A distinctive “carriage,” her movements fluid, untight, near metrical; incapable, one felt, of a sudden or jerky motion or gesture, of being surprised into something she would not purpose; an almost lyrical body, supple, lithe, at thoughtless ease with itself, reflexively responding as she wished; an actual tool of her inner intentions. One does not often see that, in man or woman. And in the manner in which I am speaking of it, that is, of utter unconscious naturalness, a quality I believe virtually impossible to teach; one has it or not. Emerging from her officer’s hat and just touching the top of the epauletted white blouse was a pleasing plumage, blond-brown hair with the shining peanut-butter layers that bespeak the real thing as opposed to something out of a bottle. There was a cleanness about her, one having nothing to do with soap and water; cleanlimbed, with her fairness of skin, the high, clean-wrought cheekbones, the clean lights in her hair. Above all one felt about her, like a barrier aura, that withheldness, a mystery of allurement that suggested endless discoveries to be made, if one could only break through it, some of them possibly of the most oppositive nature, not necessarily excluding a thriving bitchiness. One simply did not have the slightest degree of certainty what she was in that territory.
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