At the Midway (44 page)

"Yes?" Davis prodded.

The doctor seemed to turn to stone.  Disappointment leaked back into the midshipman's mood.  Singleton had finally managed to interest him in something, only to veer off in the middle of his dissertation.

"I...  I'm not very good at it."  He pushed backwards.  The motor whined.  He produced a flask, took several sips.

"Sir, if you don't mind my asking... why did you come back?"

"Don't be a fool.  Money, of course.  And I can make a fine purse, now.  'I was a prisoner of the Grand Atlantic Fleet.'  That's an article that'll sell, I'll warrant."  Seeing the midshipman's anger, he softened his next words.  "I think you really want to ask:  Why do I drink?"

"No, sir.  More like, why do you drink so much?"

"Fair enough."  He took out a flask and took several sips.  "What were you doing three years ago?"

"Sir?  I was in school."

"Did they teach anything about the great eclipse of 1905 in that school?"

"We read about it some."

Stretching out his hand, the doctor described an arc in the air.  For the first time Davis noted his wedding band.  Hard to think of this old fart being married.

"From Hudson Bay to Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic.  Great swatches of the planet blotted out.  Spain, Algiers, Tunis, Egypt.  Total.  But a total eclipse can't last for more than seven minutes.  Very rare.  The eclipse of 1905 lasted three minutes, forty-five seconds.  We had to prepare a year in advance to make the most of those minutes.  Much like all your training on the six-incher, wouldn't you say?"

Davis caught faint shouts through the scuttle.  Had the Beck-Garrett fight begun?  Or was it the preliminary bout?

"Nine expeditions were sent out from the States alone.  Many more from the European nations.  To look at the Sun.  What we see is the photosphere
-
-
mere surface.  Current theory has it that it's made up of billions of granules five hundred miles thick, floating on a dark surface."  Singleton shrugged.  "After that, there's a theoretical 'reversing layer'
-
-
called so because it reverses the solar spectrum.  Farther down is the chromosphere, the red mass of hydrogen.  It's from there that flames shoot up as much as one hundred thousand miles.  Think about that, lad."

Not much to do with the cost of tea in China, Davis thought wearily.

"I was with the
Minnesota
.  We dropped off Professor Bigelow at the Puerta Coeli Station in Spain.  He would be performing experiments with the camera coelostat and the spectrograph.  Meanwhile, we sailed on to Algeria.

"You can't possibly imagine how delicate our instruments were, how carefully they had to be managed."  With unintended parody he demonstrated this fact by turning tiny invisible knobs.  "We had a fifteen-inch camera mounted on a polar axis, a concave grating spectrograph, prismatic polarigraphs for measuring the polarity of the corona,
a chromospectrograph
--"

"Yes, sir."

"Uh... all the instruments were calibrated at the Naval Observatory in Washington, of course.  But they had to be set up so precisely... a millimeter off and the results would be useless."

Listening to the doctor's long, sad sigh, Davis looked at him keenly.  No doubt, this extended prologue was leading up to a point.  The middy found his interest piqued in spite of himself.  He sensed the profound event Singleton was about to reveal had much to do with his fall from grace.  He looked like a man whose vision had skipped off the present and was sinking in the deep past.

"We were quartered in an old palace.  I was given a room once used by a bey.  Princely, to say the least.  Come morning, we passed through Guelma...."  The doctor stared at the shot glass on the table for a long moment, as though contemplating formality.  Then he shrugged and took another long pull from the flask.  "They all wore white there.  They were a filthy, godless race... and they all wore white.

"The day came.  August 30.  And I handed over my duties to the naval science attaché."

Davis waited for his explanation.  After a minute of listening to the little motor whir and whine, he grew impatient and asked, "Why did you do that, sir?"

"I couldn't function, lad."

"You were sick?"

"You mean snookered?  No.  I was supposed to make the final adjustments.  Had to be sober as a bell.  What happened... I don't know.  You see, the night before….  What I'm trying to describe is a perfectly ordinary event that had extraordinary consequences.  I'd drifted off by myself.  Just looking around.  All white.  Kaffir or Moslem, didn't matter.  All dressed in blessed white.  Even their buildings, like adobe.  All that virginal boasting in a land as scurrilous as Gomorrah.  It was evening, you see.  I had to get back to the site to take some astronomical readings.  And just as I looked up I saw a minaret.  And just above it--impaled almost--was Venus.  Like some renegade Star of Bethlehem.  And then the muezzin called for evening prayers...

"Do you know what a conjunction is, midshipman?  The old astrologers believed in them.  Venus, the minaret, the call to the faithful.  It was a cabalistic moment.  An evil conjunction.  At that instant I lost...
me
.  Nothing mystical.  I didn't lose myself
in
something.  I'm no saint.  I'm a scientist.  I simply lost contact..." he pinched himself, "…with this.  With it all. 
I knew I wouldn't be able to function the next day.  I suppose that's how I came to be here.  When I handed over responsibility for the expedition to the attaché, the Navy thought I was being generous.  Giving them the honor of discovery and all that.  They were so thankful they gave me a berth with the Fleet."

"I don't get it," said Davis.  He'd expected something more dramatic.  An encounter with Berber pirates, a mutilating sword thrust.  Singleton's epiphany seemed so groundless. 
Stupid
.  He looked away.  It was hot.  He yawned.

"Midshipman Davis," the doctor slurred, "I didn't expect you to understand.  It was everything to me, though.  Since that night I haven't been able to finish reading a single book.  Not Euripides in the original.  Not James to pass the time.  I can't concentrate.  I've lost focus.  My
self
."

"You mean you forgot everything?"

Singleton reared up, startled by Davis' voice.  The look in his eyes suggested he'd forgotten the midshipman was present.
He had been speaking to himself.  Already flush, he went even redder.  "I… well, no.  It's still all there.  Up here.  But it's... uh... jumbled.  The Periodic Table is gone, for one.  I remember all the elements.  Used to be able to recite them in order.  Atomic weights, valences.  No more.  The organization is…."  He wiped his face.  Davis could tell he was embarrassed.  "And now here I am with my… my armamentarium, if you will.  And I can't use a whit of it. "

This seemed a gross inaccuracy to Davis.  Singleton had been playing with his scientific toys since day one of the voyage.

"Ah... it was an act of God in a godless land," Singleton concluded, averting his eyes.

Davis concentrated on the fight sounds coming through the scuttle.  Forget Singleton, starting a story he couldn't finish.  The fight outside would finish and he would only hear the report of it.  Christ, what was the doctor going on about, anyway?  He'd been in fine scientific fettle when he stuck all those men with needles.

Or had it all been a hoax?

He felt imprisoned.  Worse, locked up in an insane asylum.  Drunk as he was, Singleton saw a grand, comprehensible tapestry underlying his non sequiturs.  Davis saw only a vermicelli mess.

Midshipman Beck was scared to death.  He knew he had weight on Garrett.  He knew he had reach.  Muscle, no doubt.  Moral sanctity as well.

But would he win?

Or would he make an ass of himself?

As the men cheered his entrance into the deck-plate arena he saw a small man opposite him--and had to glance twice before recognizing the ensign.  Garrett was
short
.  Garrett was
small
.  Why had Beck never noticed that before?  The physical comparison was not invidious.  They were both middleweights.  Yet they were at extremes in the category, Beck's one hundred and sixty pounds to Garrett's one hundred and forty-six.  Like the middy, he was stripped to trunks, black rubber-soled shoes, and boxing gloves from the Entertainment Fund cache.  The sinister cockiness that had made Garrett the bête noire of noncoms had faded somewhat, but when Beck gave him another glance to verify his first impression, Garrett tossed him a grin that seemed effortless, unconcerned, deadly.  Beck's bud of resolution died a-blooming.  How could he have been such a fool?  Garrett would win.  He would hound Beck the rest of his life.  He might as well leap the rail and put an end to the humiliation.

The moment was coming.  It was unavoidable.

A face caught his attention.  The mere fact that it was familiar for an instant made him think it was Davis.  But it turned out to be one of the marines who had been looking on, laughing, the day Garrett landed the dolphin.  Damn them!  The marines always seemed to be watching the sailors with a smirk, like owners taking note of their pets' antics.  Swiveling his head, he noted at least a dozen of them in the audience.  Why weren't they busy doing something else?  And how could it be that so many bluejackets were free to look on?  Come to think of it...  didn't
he
have better things to do?

Beck felt nauseous.  Each second beat against his stomach, turning it to jelly.  He began a silent prayer, but stopped when he noticed a marine watching his lips move.

The sun poured down.  A hot pulse reflected off the turrets.  The petty officer overseeing the match held a stopwatch in one hand.  The other hand was raised.  When he dropped it, a bell was rung.

Ensign and midshipman closed cautiously.

"You called me away from the bridge for
this
?"  Captain Oates' gruff tone did not conceal his nervousness, but rather enhanced it, shagged it, shaped it into an ugly monster the navigator could barely look at.

"I'm sorry sir, but we were lucky to get it.  The public library lost its atlases in the quake and fire and they haven't got new ones.  We found this in a private library."

Understandable, but frustrating.  The atlas showed nothing more than a speck at 28
°
20', 177
°
20'W.  Admiral
Thomas had let drop the fact that Midway had had its share of shipwrecks.  Like most atolls, its coral reefs were notorious for ripping out ship bottoms and spilling crews over the ocean bed.  This left Oates blanched and infuriated.  How blithely men were sent into dangerous waters!  His silent fury was increased when Thomas turned down his request to scour the other ships for a decent chart of the area.  No need to stir up rumors.  It was hard enough thinking up excuses for the other captains for the urgent coaling of the
Florida
.  Even though they were not due to leave any time soon, it seemed an insult that the heap of the Fleet had won priority for anything.  But it was better to venture a few diplomatic lies than risk the truth getting out.  A Jap attack on Midway could result in a wholesale massacre of
Issei
on the West Coast.

Still, a dangerous, complete revelation of the facts, as far as they were known, forcing the entire Fleet to respond, would have been preferable to making this lonely trip.  Oates could not convince himself the Japanese had conquered the atoll.  What would be the point?  There were any number of more valuable possessions in the Pacific.  There had been a disaster, no doubt.  But the captain suspected it was more in the nature of a catastrophic fire in the cable station.  Perhaps, as the Admiral himself had suggested, the Japanese workers on the island had rioted, for one reason or another.  That would explain the frantic confusion of the last message.  But war?  Not likely.

I'll bet the Japs have good charts
, Oates thought miserably, unable to dismiss the possibility of coming nose to nose with the Imperial Fleet.  Whether by reef or enemy action, it was all too conceivable that the
Florida
was facing a quick demise at a lonely outpost.

The navigator stood up from the chart table, his compass dangling helplessly on his index finger.  "Sir, I'm afraid...."

"Yes?"

"Even what little we have... this atlas doesn't seem to be very accurate.  It shows Hawaii off by four degrees from what we have on our charts.  Midway's so small we could miss it with the slightest deviation from the correct course and we don't even know the correct course."

"See that we don't."

Oates followed his terse command with an equally abrupt departure from the chart room.  What more could go wrong?  As a young man contemplating the meaning of existence, he had dwelled on the fact that you could not physically strike God.  It had infuriated him that the Creator could use humans like playthings, obliviously inflict pain and thwart human emotions and man could not only not stop it, but had no options for revenge.

As the years passed, thoughts of the Almighty receded like a series of stormy days.  Oates was remarkably agnostic for a seaman.  Omnipotent power was replaced by the tyranny of petty potentates.  The Navy's Order of Command only made them slightly more visible.  The president decreed, the admiral flaunted his quirks, the boatswain treated the men under him well or cruelly, depending on his whims.  But the invisible potentates, the flukes and flaws that encumbered daily existence, were the real nemeses.  Just as Oates considered God an adversary beyond reach, so too life itself.  The foibles of men and the chance dispositions of nature were as undeniable and amorphous in their complex totality as God Himself.  Once again, Oates found himself clenching his fists at things that could not be hit.