The Circle (18 page)

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

The intercom clicked twice and went dead. He risked a quick glance around the pilothouse. It was snug and stuffy-hot. Faint lights showed him instrument faces. A seaman sniffled behind him, just in from his turn as lookout. Evlin was reading message traffic now, apparently oblivious to what was going on.

He let himself sag against the repeater. He wished he was down in Sonar; what Reed was doing sounded interesting. More interesting than supervising spray-painting. That thought led him again to what had happened on the fantail. He wanted badly to talk to somebody about it. It was hard to keep your mind off coming so close to death.

But he couldn't. Packer had made that plain. So instead, he said to Evlin, “How long you been aboard
Ryan,
sir?”

“Almost two years.”

“What did you do before that?”

The operations officer's glasses caught the flicker of the radar as he glanced up. “Usual stuff. Communications officer on an ammo ship, then put in for destroyers and got a
Mitscher
-class. A tour on
Bronstein,
department-head school—and here I am.”

“Two years—you're coming up on the end of your tour. What's next?”

Evlin hung up the clipboard. “
Ryan
's my last ship, Dan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've got my letter in. I'm leaving the Navy January twentieth.”

“Oh. I didn't know that.” The knowledge suddenly changed his perception of Evlin. He looked again, imagining more than seeing the clear, alert face, rimless glasses, lock of brown hair. Cold-looking at first, precise, demanding, Evlin grew on you. “What are you gonna do?”

“Teach.”

“That sounds like it'd suit you. What are you going to teach?”

“Well, that depends. Deanne and I are going to go out to California and find out.”

“You're going all the way to California to find out what you're going to teach?”

Evlin chuckled and dug into his pocket. For a moment Dan thought he was going to show him his wife's picture. But when the flashlight came on, the face in the photo was gray-bearded, the eyes piercing yet good-humored. Dan looked up, puzzled.

“The Master.”

“Wait a minute.”

Evlin laughed again and put the photograph away. “Ever heard of—” He said something in a foreign language, too rapid to catch.

“Is it a place?”

“That's his name. Deanne met him in San Diego. I was upset over it at first. That some guru had something I couldn't give her. Then I got to know him. Once I'm out, we'll study at the Consciousness Center for a while. Then we'll be teachers—or whatever else he asks us to do.”

Dan checked the time. A while yet till the next turn. But—wait a minute! Evlin was no ordinary officer, but this was way out of bounds. “What kind of things does this—guru—have that you and your wife need?”

“You don't strike me as a religious guy, Dan.”

“Well, I guess not anymore.”

“But you want me to explain a holy man to you, like explaining how a sonar works. Right? No, don't be embarrassed. I'd better get used to it.

“To start with, you probably figure me for crazy, going around with a picture like that in my wallet and calling him my ‘Master,' as if I were a dog.”

“Oh, no,” he said guiltily. It was exactly what he'd been thinking. “I just, you know, wondered.…”

“Why don't you go over there in that corner?”

“What?”

“There's something over there. I saw it earlier. By the intercom.”

Dan's flash picked out a black shape under Bryce's chair. “You don't mean … a family-sized U.S. Navy—issue roach, somewhat lifeless?”

“That's it. I noticed it there last night.”

“You squashed it?”

“No. It was that way when I found it.”

“What about it?”

“As you noted, it's dead.”

“Well, everybody's got to go.”

“Correct and succinct. Now, what's the difference between the roach and you?”

Dan checked the clock again, checked the radar, rubbed the lenses of his binoculars across the blackness ahead. The conversation didn't seem out of the ordinary. At night, at sea, men grew close enough or bored enough to talk in subdued, casual voices about things they talked about ashore only with people they loved very much, or when they were very drunk. “That I'm a thinking organism?”

“Oh, it
thought.
Not clearly. But that difference is in degree only. No, the difference is that the roach was as limited by its programming as our radar there. It couldn't choose what it was going to be or do. We can.”

“Suppose I buy that. Then what?”

“I think alternate paths, a degree of freedom, require the existence of a choice-maker. This implies consciousness: the awareness that we exist. That's our gift and our curse. That's what's really divine in us. But how many of us use that freedom?”

“Is it our business what other people do?”

“Point missed completely. Of course they're responsible for their choices, or at least it feels that way to you now. Later you realize most of that's an illusion, like the idea of self. But most people spend their lives plotting to get more freedom, which they conceive of as enough money and time to do what they—”

The intercom said in a gritty, hollow imitation of Aaron Reed's voice, “Bridge, Sonar: Gained passive contact on submerged submarine, bearing zero-five-seven, range seventy-six thousand yards. Sounds like a U.S. nuclear attack running loud. Recommend classify friendly.”

“Stand by.” Evlin buzzed the captain, spoke briefly, listened, and hung up. “Sonar, Bridge: Classification approved. Want us to do anything up here?”

“Just stay in the racetrack. He'll come to us.”

Evlin signed off. “Now, what were we talking about? Oh yeah—that people will work and steal and lie to get money, and leisure, in order to do what they want.

“But I don't think the average guy spends ten hours of his life thinking seriously about what he really wants
and why.
Instead he desires what the local system, whatever it may be, wants him to desire. Liberty in Naples, or a sports car, or twenty years and a retirement check. Or four stripes, or his own command. But that's not freedom. That's programming. Just like the roach—only it never had another choice.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us face-to-face with the tough one. That consciousness, does it survive after we die? Does it rejoin something greater? Or does it just stop?

“But even if the world's wholly material, as the Buddha thought, if we're going to live in it as conscious beings, we've got to turn away from the carnival. We've got to think about the important things. Such as: What are we going to do with however many years we have of thinking, acting life? That, by the way, is why I brought up Sartre before.”

“But you don't believe in existentialism, because you're not an atheist.”

“Oversimplified, but basically correct. Not secular existentialism, anyway.”

“Are you going to try to save me, Al?”

“Dan, I don't think being ‘saved' is all that hard. You don't have to have a revelation, or starve yourself, or have some cracker in a polyester suit hit you on the forehead. A spiritual teacher helps, but I think compassion and good works will do it all by themselves. You don't have to believe in a thing.”

“In nothing?” He thought of Ivan Karamazov.

“Look. The basics are ridiculously simple—as if somebody laid it all out so clearly nobody could miss it. Every religion starts from the same rule: Don't hurt the other guy, unless you like being hurt yourself. But hell, you don't need threats to tell you that. Most people arrive at it more or less by instinct. Maybe not right away, but once they suffer a little, they do.”

“Not everybody has time.”

“We get all we need.” Evlin sounded certain in the dark. “Most people get fifty, sixty years. How much do you need, if you're serious? The Master comes out of Hinduism, he says there are millions of cycles before we wise up. I suspect that's to justify their social system, with the Untouchables and all. There are times in everybody's life when he's close. When you know life's sacred, life's related, you're part of a whole. If you can break through to that on a full-time basis … or make it a habit…”

“What's our noble XO think about all this?”

“Bryce? He thinks I'm from another planet.” They both laughed. “So it must not be as simple to him.”

“You don't think everybody really knows that, deep down, but they push the plate away?”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not sure. Actually, I think I'm getting confused.”

“Well, maybe that's enough for one watch. But just look out there.”

Dan glanced through the starboard window just as spray wiped across it. The wipers flung it instantly away. As the ship rolled, he caught a glimpse of a comber. It moved in on them slowly out of the north, black on deeper black, a green phosphorescence rippling and flickering along its crest.

“There are things you can't say in words,” said Evlin. Dan heard the crackle of lens paper. “Just look out there, and think about it. We can talk more later—if you want.”

The wave was almost on them. “Get ready, Ali, here comes a big mother.”

“Got her clamped, sir.”

“Coffee, sir?” muttered Pettus, his face averted.

“Thanks.”

“Cream ‘n' sugar?”

“Yes—no, just give it to me black.”

The sea hit square, so hard the old tin can's bones shook. The deck tilted and he grabbed for the steadying rail. Scalding liquid slopped over his fingers. He hissed, snatched a quick gulp, and burned his mouth, too.

When he was done cursing, he wedged the cup between two cables and bent to the radar. The white maculation of sea return covered the screen. Somewhere under this wind-lashed waste, a submarine was slipping quietly through the darkness toward them.

A hoarse seal-like barking startled him. His flashlight found Pettus, bent over a lashed-down wastebasket. His agonized face gleamed wetly in the pink light. Dan faced forward, breathing deeply. He'd been regretting the veal since he took his first bite of it, and hearing Pettus rapid-firing his cookies didn't help. He tried more coffee.

“Bridge, Sonar!”

“Bridge, aye.”

“Contact ‘Alfa' is now at first CZ zone, bearing zero-five-eight, range thirty-nine thousand yards. Course two-four-four, speed twenty-five. Tentative identification is U.S. nuclear attack, SSN-six thirty-seven—class.”

“I'll tell the captain.”

“I'll do it,” said Evlin, picking up the phone.

Dan nodded. He turned back to the window, and froze.

Another wave was on them. A huge one, special delivery for USS
Ryan
straight from the Arctic across a thousand miles of open sea. In the dim illumination of the masthead light, it curled its ragged mane toward him, hollow within.

He snapped his eyes down. The rudder-angle indicator glowed at right fifteen. Coffey, swearing softly at the wheel, had anticipated it. There was nothing for him to do but grab the overhead rail, and then, as the old ship heeled more, and more, listen to the clatter of gear leaving the chart-house shelves, the rumble of something shifting down deep in the hull. Spray battered over the windows, blurring the dark with a roar that continued for seconds. His feet left the deck. Mats and cups and logbooks leapt free as if thrown by a squad of poltergeists, rattling down smooth tile suddenly become the side of a cliff. His eye brushed the lighted arc of the clinometer, caught the bubble wavering to the left of fifty.

Could Evlin be right?

Because just then, suddenly, inexplicably, and just for a moment, he forgot his nausea; forgot the tension in his back; forgot the grit behind his eyeballs from lack of sleep, the ache in his legs from hours of watch. He laughed with the glee and glory of fighting the sea in a small ship, in a world where disaster and triumph were both possible and both exhilarating. But he knew even as he wondered, this wasn't the moment Evlin had described, the moment of insight, of revelation. This was visceral, not spiritual; a power and a glory that comes only a few times in each life. It wasn't epiphany. It was only youth.

*   *   *

THE submarine came up as his watch was ending, and checked in on UHF from periscope depth. Evlin talked to him for a few minutes on the radio, working out ranges and bearings. Reassured, it broached its sail to provide a radar contact.
Ryan
was on the downwind leg, wallowing as she always did in stern seas. The two ships closed slowly, cautiously, like antique wineglasses too fragile to risk clinking. By the time Barry Ohlmeyer showed up to relieve Dan, they were close enough to make out
Pargo
's sail and shears through the night glasses, a bladelike tower low to the sea. Below it in the troughs, a black cylinder showed from time to time. “Ballasted down,” muttered Evlin, holding his binoculars with the tips of his fingers. “And rolling like a sonofabitch. Guess we better get the captain up here.”

Packer, when he came, barely glanced at the sub. He went straight to the radio remote. A moment later the transmit light went on. Dan kept his binoculars on the sub as he listened to the conversation.

“‘Playmate reporting,' he says,” said the gunnery officer beside him. “Casual, aren't they? Look at the way that pig rolls.”

“‘Real destroyer weather.' Got a sense of humor, too.” Dan lowered his glasses, wondering whether any of his classmates were over there. “We'll be with them how long?”

“That's up to the captain. And Reed, and the sonar gang. Till they're satisfied they got enough data.”

The captain was still talking. Suddenly Dan realized he was wasting sleeping time. “Damn,” he said. “Barry, you ready to take it?”