by Herman Wouk
“What I mean,” persisted Harding, “you can go on spinning those symbols forever, and one’s as good as another-”
“Not quite,” said Keefer, with a brief nod of appreciation at the point, “because the test of the validity of any symbol is the extent to which it’s rooted in reality. What I said about the Abel was a specious verbalism to answer you. But you see I am aboard the Caine.”
“Then we’re all outcasts for our sins,” said Willie.
“Hell, what sins? Keith looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth,” said Maryk. “Look at that sweet face.”
“Who knows? Maybe he robbed his mother’s purse once,” said Keefer. “Sin is relative to character.”
“Wonder what I ever did,” said Gorton.
“It’s hard to know what would be sin in a born degenerate,” said Keefer. “You probably worship Satan in that private stateroom.”
“I,” said the captain, rising, “am going to see that Hopalong Cassidy movie on the Johnson. Tom gives me mental indigestion.”
The Caine left Pearl Harbor at dawn in a rain squall.
The light was still dim on the bridge when Maryk bawled into a greenish brass speaking tube, “Ready in all respects to get under way, Captain!” Willie, stationed on the bridge as Junior OOD, was utterly bewildered by the rapid reports and orders which went before this word. He stood out in the warm rain in his khakis, shielding his binoculars under his arm, denying himself the protection of the pilothouse in the vague intention of demonstrating that he was a real seaman.
Captain de Vriess came up the ladder. He paced the bridge slowly, leaning over the bulwarks to look at the lines, estimating the wind, peering astern at the channel, issuing brief orders in a dry pleasant tone. His bearing was very impressive, Willie admitted to himself, because it was natural, perhaps unconscious. It was not a matter of a stiff spine, squared shoulders, and a sucked-in stomach. Knowledge was in his eye, authority in his manner, decision in the sharp lines of his mouth.
“Well, hell,” Willie thought, “if a destroyer captain can’t get a ship away from alongside, what is he good for?” He had already adopted the Caine mode of shading the truth toward the glamorous side by regarding the ship as an honest-to-goodness destroyer.
His meditations were interrupted by a shocking blast on the ship’s steam whistle. The stern of the destroyer next to the Caine swung away sluggishly, pulled by a small tug, leaving a narrow triangle of open water bubbling under the rain.
“Take in all lines to port,” said the captain.
A goateed sailor named Grubnecker, who wore headphones, reported in a moment, “All lines taken in fore and aft, sir.”
“Port back one third,” said the captain.
The fat ship’s yeoman at the engine telegraph, Jellybelly, repeated the order and rang it up. The engine-room pointer answered. The ship began to vibrate, and slowly to move backward. Willie had an intuitive flash that this was a historic moment, his first time under way aboard the Caine. But he pushed it from his mind. This ship was not going to be important in his life-he was determined to see to that.
“Stand clear of the bulkhead, Mr. Keith,” said De Vriess sharply, leaning over the side.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said Willie, leaping aside. He mopped the streaming rain from his face.
“All engines stop,” ordered De Vriess. He walked past Willie, remarking, “Don’t you know enough to get in out of the rain? Go in the pilothouse.”
“Thank you, sir.” He took shelter gladly. A stiff wind was slanting the rain across the channel. Drops drummed on the windows of the wheelhouse.
“Fantail reports channel buoy a hundred yards dead astern,” called Grubnecker.
“I see it,” said the captain.
Maryk, in a dripping mackintosh, peered down the channel through binoculars. “Submarine coming down the channel, Captain. Making ten knots. Distance one thousand.”
“Very well.”
“Fantail reports battle wagon and two tin cans coming up-channel past the gate, sir,” said the telephone talker. “Forty-second Street and Broadway out here today,” said De Vriess.
Willie looked out at the choppy channel, thinking that the Caine was in difficulties already. The wind was moving her swiftly down on the channel buoy. There was little space to maneuver between the bobbing buoy and the ships in the docks. The battleship and the submarine were rapidly closing from both sides.
De Vriess, unperturbed, issued a swift series of engine and rudder orders, the purpose of which escaped Willie. But the effect was to swing the minesweeper around in the backing arc, heading down-channel, well clear of the buoy, falling in line behind the departing submarine. Meantime the battleship and its escorts passed down the port side with plenty of room. Willie observed that none of the sailors commented or seemed impressed, so he assumed that what had appeared knotty to him was a matter of course to an experienced seaman.
Maryk stepped into the pilothouse and swabbed his face with a towel hung on the captain’s chair. “Damn! Puget Sound weather.” He noticed Willie standing around, looking uncommonly useless. “What the devil are you doing in here? You’re supposed to stand lookout on the starboard side-”
“Captain told me to get in out of the rain.”
“Hell, you probably were under his feet. Come on out. You won’t melt.”
“Gladly, sir.” Willie followed him out into the weather, irritated at being in the wrong whatever he did.
“Learn anything,” asked Maryk, peering down-channel, “from that backing maneuver?”
“Seemed pretty routine,” said Willie.
Maryk dipped his binoculars and looked at Willie, showing all his teeth in a mystified grin. “You ever been on a bridge before, Keith?”
“No, sir.”
Maryk nodded, and resumed his search of the channel through the glasses.
“Why,” said Willie, wiping rain from his eyes, “was there anything remarkable about it?”
“Christ, no, no,” said Maryk. “Any ensign could have handled the ship the way the old man did. I thought maybe you were impressed for no good reason.” He grinned again and walked to the other side of the bridge.
The squall passed and the sun came out brilliantly as the Caine cleared the channel entrance. When Willie came off watch he went to the forescastle to enjoy the view of Diamond Head and Oahu’s green hills. The ship knifed through calm blue water at twenty knots. He was agreeably surprised at the old minesweeper’s brisk speed. There were traces of destroyer grandeur yet in the rusty ruin. The deck rolled steeply, and sparkling spray flew up from the bow wave, and Willie was proud of not being in the least seasick. For the first time since his arrival on the Caine he felt moderately happy.
But he made the mistake of going below for a cup of coffee. Keefer captured him and set him to work correcting publications. This was the dreariest of all communication chores. Willie hated the red ink, the scissors and smelly paste, and the interminable niggling corrections: “Page 9 para. 0862 line 3: change All prescribed gunnery exercises to read All gunnery exercises prescribed by USNF 7A.” He had visions of thousands of ensigns all over the globe straining their eyes and crooking their backs over these preposterous trifles.
The motion of the ship, heaving the green table up and down as he bent over it, began to trouble him. He noticed with annoyance that some of the corrections which Keefer had dumped on him in a heap were very old. Several of them he had himself entered in CincPac’s books, months ago. At one point he threw down the pen with an exclamation of disgust. He had spent an hour minutely entering a set of ink corrections which were obsolete; further down in the pile there were new printed pages to replace them. “Damn,” he said to Carmody, who was decoding messages beside him, “doesn’t Keefer ever enter corrections? These things are piled up since the last war.”
“Lieutenant Keefer’s too busy with his novel,” burst out Carmody bitterly, stroking his faint mustache.
“What novel?”
“He’s writing some kind of novel. Half the time at night when I’m trying to sleep he’s pacing around talking to himself. Then in the daytime he flakes out. Why, he can work these damn decoding gismos ten times faster than anybody in the wardroom. He spent six months on the beach studying them. He could clear up the whole traffic in a couple of hours a day. But we’re always behind, and you, Rabbitt and I are clearing about ninety per cent of it. I think he’s a foul ball.”
“Have you read any of the novel?”
“Hell, I have no time to read novels by good authors. Why should I bother with his tripe?” Carmody twisted his blue-and-gold Annapolis ring nervously with his thumb. He rose and poured himself coffee. “Want some Joe?”
“Thanks- Well, look,” said Willie, accepting the cup, “this kind of thing must be horribly dull to a man of his talents.”
“What talents?” Carmody dropped into a chair.
“He’s a professional author, Carmody. Didn’t you know that? He’s had stories in magazines. The Theatre Guild had an option on one of his plays-”
“So what? He’s on the Caine now, just like you and me.”
“If he brings a great novel off the Caine,” said Willie, “it’ll be a far greater contribution to America than a lot of decodes.”
“His assignment is communications, not contributions to America-”
Keefer entered the wardroom in underwear and went to the coffee corner. “How are you doing, lads?”
“All right, sir,” said Carmody with sudden subservience, pushing away his coffee cup and taking up a coded message.
“Except we think you ought to do some decoding for a change,” said Willie. He had no fear of Keefer’s higher military rank. He was sure the communicator laughed at such gradings. His respect for Keefer, already high, had risen sharply on learning that he was composing a novel.
Keefer smiled and came to the table. “What’s the matter, class of ’43,” he said, slouching in a chair, “want to go talk to the chaplain?”
Carmody kept his eyes down. “The coding watch is part of an ensign’s work on a small ship,” he said. “I don’t mind.
Every line officer should learn the essentials of communications, and-”
“Here,” said Keefer, draining his coffee, “give me that gismo. I’ve been doping off. Go study Navy Regulations.” He pried the device out of Carmody’s hands.
“No, I can do it, sir. Happy to-”
“Run along.”
“Why, thank you, sir.” Carmody rose, bestowed a brief arid smile on Keith, and went out.
“There goes a happy man,” said Keefer. He began whipping the coding machine through its motions. It was as Carmody had said. He was incredibly fast.
“He tells me you’re working on a novel.” Keefer nodded.
“Got much of it done?”
“About forty thousand words out of four hundred thousand.”
“Gosh. Long.”
“Longer than Ulysses. Shorter than War and Peace.”
“Is it a war novel?”
Keefer smiled ironically. “It takes place on a carrier.”
“Got a title?”
“Well, a working title.”
“What is it?” said Willie very curiously.
“Doesn’t mean much, by itself.”
“Well, I’d like to hear it.”
Keefer hesitated, and spoke the words slowly. “Multitudes, Multitudes.”
“I like it.”
“Recognize it?”
“Bible, I imagine.”
“Book of Joel. ‘Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision.’ ”
“Well, I put in right now for the millionth copy, autographed.”
Keefer gave him the whole-souled smile of a flattered author. “I’m a little way from that, yet.”
“You’ll make it. May I read some of it?”
“Perhaps. When it’s in better shape.” Keefer had never stopped decoding. He finished his third message and began a fourth.
“You really whiz through those,” marveled Willie.
“Perhaps that’s why I let ’em pile up. It’s like telling a child Red Riding Hood for the thousandth time. The thing is infantile and dull to start with, and becomes maddening with repetition.”
“Most of the Navy is repetition.”
“I don’t mind it, when there’s only fifty per cent waste motion. Communication is ninety-eight per cent waste motion. We carry a hundred and twelve registered publications. We use about six. But all the rest have to be corrected, one set of corrections superseding another every month. Take decoding. Actually about four messages a month concern this ship in any way. Commander Queeg’s orders, for instance. The minesweeping-exercise despatch. All the rest of this garbage we rake over because the captain, bless his intellectual curiosity, wants to snoop on the fleet’s activities. For only one reason. So that at the officers’ club he can say to some classmate of his, very casually, don’t you know, ‘Well, I hope you like screening that southern attack group in the next push.’ Makes him sound like a friend of the admirals. I’ve seen him do it a dozen times.”
He kept racing through the decoding steps as he talked. Willie was fascinated by his negligent speed. Already he had done more work than Willie could perform in an hour; and Willie was the speediest of the ensigns.
“I can’t get over the way you polish those off.”
“Willie, aren’t you wise to the Navy yet? It’s all child’s play. The work has been fragmentized by a few excellent brains at the top, on the assumption that near-morons will be responsible for each fragment. The assumption is sound enough for peacetime. There’s a handful of brilliant boys who come into the Navy with the long purpose of becoming the Nation’s admirals, and they succeed invariably because there’s no competition. For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of polite penal servitude. What self-respecting American of even average gifts, let alone superior ones, will enter such a life? Well, now, comes a war, and the gifted civilians swarm into the service. Is it any wonder that they master in a matter of weeks what the near-morons painfully acquire in years? Take code devices. Navy plodders grind out maybe five, six messages an hour with them. Any half-baked reserve communicator can learn to whip out twenty an hour. No wonder the poor peons resent us-”
“Heresy, heresy,” Willie said, rather startled and embarrassed.
“Not at all. Plain fact. Whether it’s the fragment of coding, the fragment of engineering, the fragment of gunnery-you’ll find them all predigested and regulated to a point where you’d have to search the insane asylums to find people who could muff the jobs. Remember that one point. It explains, and reconciles you to, all the Navy Regulations, and all the required reports, and all the emphasis on memory and obedience, and all the standardized ways of doing things. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, ‘How would I do this if I were a fool?’ Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you’ll never go wrong- Well, that cleans up brother Carmody’s traffic, he added, pushing aside the heap of despatches. “Want me to do yours?”
“No, thank you, sir- You’re pretty bitter about the Navy-”
“No, no, Willie,” said Keefer earnestly. “I approve of the whole design. We need a navy, and there’s no other way to run one in a free society. It simply takes a little time to see the true picture, and I’m passing on to you the fruits of my analysis. You have wit and background. You’d come to the same conclusion in a few months. Remember Socrates’ slave who worked out the pons asinorum with a stick in the sand? A fact of nature emerges by itself after a while. It would come pretty quickly to you.”
“So that’s your pons asin
orum of shipboard life? ‘The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.’ “
“An excellent demonstration,” Keefer smiled, nodding, “of obedient memory, Willie. You’ll be a naval officer yet.”
A few hours later Willie was on the bridge again with Maryk for the noon-to-four watch. Captain de Vriess dozed in his narrow chair on the starboard side of the pilothouse. The remains of his lunch in a tin tray rested on the deck under the chair: a broken corn muffin, fragments of Swiss steak, and an empty coffee mug. The weather was clear and hot, the sea choppy with whitecaps. The Caine rolled and creaked, cutting across the troughs of the waves at fifteen knots. A telephone buzzed. Willie answered it.
“Forward fireroom requests permission to blow tubes,” croaked the phone. Willie repeated the request to Maryk.
“Granted,” said the OOD, after a glance at the fluttering flag on the mast. There was a rumble from the stacks and inky smoke billowed out and floated away perpendicularly to leeward. “Good time to blow tubes,” said Maryk. “Wind on the beam. Carries the soot well clear. Sometimes you have to change course to get the wind right. Then you ask the skipper’s permission.”
The ship took a long steep roll. The rubber mats on the wheelhouse deck slid in a heap to one side. Willie clung to a window handle as the quartermaster rescued the mats. “Sure rolls with the wind on the beam,” he observed.
“These buckets roll in drydock,” said Maryk. “Lot of freeboard forward and too much weight aft. All that sweep gear. Pretty poor stability. Wind on the beam really pushes her over.” He strolled out on the starboard wing, and Willie followed him, glad of the chance to let some fresh air blow in his face. The rolling bothered him in the narrow stuffy pilothouse. He decided he would do most of his watch-standing on these open wings. It would give him a nice sunburn.
The first lieutenant peered constantly seaward, sometimes making a slow sweep of the horizon with his binoculars. Willie imitated him, but the sea was empty, and he soon became bored.
“Mr. Maryk,” he said, “what do you think of Mr. Keefer?”