The Circle (28 page)

He wanted to go below. He wanted to tie himself into his rack in the hot, stuffy compartment and sleep for a year.

But far beneath this rage, so many dark fathoms down that no motion of the storm could reach it, was something alien, something dangerous. Something they had to find again, and hold until help arrived.

Help … for the first time, it occurred to him that if U.S. and British submarines were on their way, it stood to reason that more Soviets could be headed here, too.

When he got back to CIC Pedersen was still there, slumped in front of the unlighted air plot. A mug smoked in his twitching hand. He looked asleep, but the mug leveled itself automatically as
Ryan
began a fresh series of crashing pitches, kicking her heels to the sea.

“Chief, you got anything that'll tell me what I'm supposed to be doing up here? Something about ASW, about tracking subs?”

Pedersen opened his eyes. He looked surprised. Then he smiled.

“Sure, Ensign. We'll fix you up.”

He took the stack of pubs, braced himself grimly in a corner, and began to read.

13

DAN had never understood what made his father drink. When he was sober, Victor Lenson seemed subdued, but not unhappy. Dan remembered times they'd had fun together. How they'd rebuilt the old garage, Vic and the boys, small then, “helping” their father with tack hammers and strips of broken lath.

Then one day, there'd be the bottle. And not long after the threats, the shouting, the accusations. The crash of glass, his mother's pleading, and finally her screams. Then at the last just the broken lost voice mumbling about Charlie Company, First Battalion, Seventh Marines, and the night the Chinese came through the perimeter at Yudamn-ni.

When he was little, he'd crawled behind his bed into a recess so small, he'd thought an adult couldn't reach him. But his father had, throwing the heavy bed aside in a terrifying display of strength, pulling him out and strapping him while he screamed and fought to escape. He never knew where he'd thought to go.

For a while after the hospital Vic seemed better. He didn't drink anymore, and they took him on again down at the station.

Then one day, Dan had been studying when he heard the front door slam. A little later, his mother's voice, with a catch in it, called to the boys to go upstairs.

He came out of the kitchen with his book in his hand, and saw Pat and Jimmy going up. Pat was crying silently, clutching his headless bear. Jimmy's face was waxen-pale and expressionless. He'd started to follow them. Then he stopped on the first step, hearing the crack of a palm against skin.

He told his brothers to go to their room and lock the door. He put the book down on the steps. Then turned around, there on the stair, and went back down.

The sweet whiskey smell filled the house. His father stood over his mother by the dining room table. Her face was in her hands and her hair hung down. Though he didn't look around, Vic must have sensed him in the doorway.

“Worthless bitch. All she ever gives me's trouble. God knows her family never did anything for us.”

He'd said, his voice breaking, “Don't hit her anymore, Dad.”

His father, the cop, no longer towered to the ceiling. Dan was fifteen, as tall as Vic Lenson now.

There was a sudden clap of lightning in his head. He staggered, tried to stay on his feet, and his father slapped him again. This time he fell across his mother. She was crying. “No, don't hit him again, darling, don't.” Shielding him with her body.

He'd always wanted to stand up for her. Sometimes he had, when he was small, and been beaten. He'd learned to stay out of it, or if he couldn't, to fall at the first blow the way she did, to cringe, cry, and feign surrender.

But this time, without warning, his mind shut off. He saw only a reddish blaze in place of thought. He got up, and his father knocked him down again.

He looked up from the rug at his father's revolver, hanging in its holster on the chair.

That was when the barrier came down, suddenly, like a fire curtain, cutting off the red blaze. From behind it, someone he'd never known he really was, someone as cold and remote as one of H. G. Wells's Martians, watched his parents and himself.

For the longest moment of his life, his father stared at him. The cold metal trembled in his hands, dragging them down. Then Vic Lenson had turned, snatched the bottle off the table, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, the screen door banged.

Then his mother was screaming at him, hitting him with closed fists. How could he threaten his own father? He was
never
to do that again. From the upstairs landing, his brothers looked down on him, horrified and rapt.

Only this time, in his dream, his father didn't leave. Instead, he came on, pulling the heavy leather belt out of its loops. And Dan had lifted the gun, to save them all.

*   *   *

THE bang woke him. He groped beneath the desk for the fallen copy of
Allied Tactical Publication One, Volume I.
Search plan ARTICHOKE, PINEAPPLE, REDWOOD. MADVECs, sonobuoy barriers, containment patterns. His brain seethed, then clicked suddenly into fatigued alertness.

He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Pedersen had left. The crashing and groaning were the same, or maybe a little more violent than when he'd nodded off. He uncoiled his legs from the chair and signed himself off on the pub log. Swinging from handhold to handhold, he headed for the exit.

As he passed the plot, all he could see was backs. They were slumped but absorbed, like weary gamblers after an all-night game. Packer, Reed, Cummings, Weaver, two enlisted he didn't know. Their faces were gray-green in the buzzing light. The 29MC was saying, “Up doppler, bearing three-one-two, range seven thousand three hundred.” They'd regained contact, then.

He suddenly remembered what they were doing here.

DESTROY B41 IMMEDIATELY IF SONAR INDICATES IMMINENT MISSILE LAUNCH.

Steel shrieked around him as the old destroyer reeled. He reeled too, groping through the red-lighted gloom of the ladderway. Now he knew why his legs hurt. Even unconscious, his body had been fighting the sea.

Beyond the door the pilothouse was black. Then lights appeared as his pupils expanded. The tiny planets of radio remotes, the restless needle of the anemometer, the melted-butter glow of the binnacle, occulted for a moment by an invisible arm. Last, he made out the circular cutouts of the windows. A little past 1600, and he'd missed the few hours of gray half-light that was Arctic day. The sounds were so familiar now he barely registered them: the ionosphere hiss of radios, the whining frenzy of wipers. Frozen spray rattled like marbles against glass. Then an irritated voice: “Bos'n! Close that fucking door!”

Suddenly he realized he was ravenous.

The wardroom was empty. Someone had cleaned up the sugar and lashed down the chairs. The coffee light was on, but when he lifted the pot it was empty of everything but a scorched reek. He staggered to the ladder and slid down it destroyer-style, boots not touching the treads.

There were perhaps forty men on
Ryan's
mess decks. Not quite a full house. You couldn't feed 280 in a sitting, but the white Formica-topped tables, the little swing-out bucket seats would take a fifth of them. Their faces were hollow, exhausted, nodding in nausea and fatigue.

He wondered for a moment whether he was wearing the wrong uniform. There was no money in his family; no gold braid-encrusted forebears, like Norden's. He should be one of these men, a radioman, a sonarman, a boiler tech. His senior year in high school, he'd already talked with the recruiter when the telegram arrived from the Academy.

Instead he was one of the ones in charge. The people who were supposed to know what to do.…

The steam tables were empty, but messmen were passing trays of bread, cheese, meat, pickles. Hands grabbed at them, throats washed them down with paper cups of purple fluid. When
Ryan
rolled, men grabbed the servers' belts, keeping them on their feet. Food and plastic forks slid across the dirty tile with each roll. The aroma of hot strong coffee radiated from the galley like lines of magnetic force. He saw khaki in a corner, and threaded his way over.

It was Al Evlin, alone. “Couldn't sleep?” said the ops officer.

“Didn't really try, sir.”

“Once we go back, we'll be on till midnight. You can still get a couple hours in.”

Dan valved bug juice from a cooler. “Anything happen since we got off?”

“Regained contact. That's all I know. We'll be back in it soon enough.”

“True.” He looked at Evlin's glasses for a moment. Then he sat down, and his voice came out guarded.

“So what did you mean, about the sea?”

“About the
sea?
”

“One night—before the storm—remember, we were having a kind of philosophical discussion. You told me to look out at the sea, and think about it.”

“Oh. I remember now. And did you?”

The grin felt strange on his face. He'd wanted to ask Evlin this for a long time. “I've done a lot of looking, but I've been too scared to think.”

A messman clattered down bread, peanut butter and jelly, butter in plastic tubs, sugar cookies. “Soup in the galley. Drink it out of cups, you want some.”

“Thank you,” said Evlin.

“Anyway, what did you mean?”

“I'd rather have you tell me what you thought I meant.”

Dan said slowly, “If I get you right—you were comparing our individual lives to the waves. Not as separate, but a—conceptual subset, like in Boolean algebra.” He paused, but Evlin kept silently impastoing bread with peanut butter. “And … so that even though each wave looks different from the rest, and it seems sometimes they die and the sea's calm, really nothing's created, and nothing dies … it's just the sea, always changing, but always still the same.”

The ops officer took a bite. “Chunky. I prefer smooth.”

“And that our existence is like that,” Dan said. He felt silly, but at the same time very clear, as if this was what he was supposed to be talking about right now, right here, in this crowded, careening space, with this man.

“I never said
that.
Nothing is
like
anything else. Language forces us to think in similes. It works when you're discussing things in terms of other things. But when you're talking about areas outside everyday experience—particle physics, for example—you can't use words at all, not and have it mean anything corresponding to reality.”

“But it makes sense, somehow. It's true in terms of matter and energy. They don't vanish. They just change forms.”

“But are the spiritual and physical worlds separate? The medieval Christians thought all of nature was a book revealing the intent of God.”

Dan said slowly, keeping his voice below the hum of other voices, “But what good does it do you to believe that, Al?”

“What
good.
Well, how would people act if they really thought everyone else was part of himself? That his neighbor's not only
like
him, the Golden Rule, but actually another,
separate
self, looking out through other eyes?”

“It would make you a lot more tolerant.” He thought about it. “And maybe, kinder.”

“And if you believed you'd be back?”

“It would make you care more about a lot of things, stuff you just shrug about now, because you figure it'll be somebody else's problem.”

“It would change the world,” Evlin said.

Ryan
gave a deep groan and rolled to her beam ends. The men grabbed the tables, letting go of food, cups, hats. The heavy steam tables shifted against their lashings, stirring above suddenly taut faces that turned to look uphill at them.

“It would change the world. And that's what the Master's trying to do. That's why I'm getting out, Dan. That's where I belong. At his side.”

Chief Bloch lurched out of the galley with BM1 Isaacs. The boatswain looked worried. Dan waved. They exchanged glances, then shoved their way through the men clinging to the tables.

Bloch hadn't shaved that day. The stubble was gray. “What you doing down here, sir? Thought you was in CIC.”

“We're port and starboard up there, Chief. How are the guys doing? We getting anything done?”

“Not a damn thing, sir. Not in this shit. I had them turned to in the paint locker for a couple hours, but fumes got so bad and they got so sick, I told them to clear out. Most of 'em are in the compartment, seized down and flaked out.”

“How about maintenance? There's gear needs tearing down and rebuilding.”

“All our shit's out on deck, sir, 'cept the windlass and wildcat up in the peak.”

“Well, how about training? Any lessons we can give them, Rights and Responsibilities, or something?”

“I'll see, sir,” said Bloch without enthusiasm.

“How you doing, Ikey?” asked Evlin. Isaacs started, then looked at him with bleary, glazed eyes.

“All right. Lieutenant, sir. I'm doing okay.”

“What's going on up there, sir? We heard something about a Russki sub. Then we didn't hear nothing after that.”

Dan wasn't sure how to answer that. It was secret, part of it top secret, the first TS-classified stuff he'd ever seen. If you went by the regs, he didn't see that the deck division had any need to know. But who were they going to tell, three hundred miles northeast of Iceland? In the end, he bunted. “I don't really know, Chief. It's so new to me, I'm not really sure what's going on.”

“How about you, Lieutenant? The guys ask us, we ought to have something to give out.”

“You're about up-to-date, Chief. We caught a Soviet submarine sneaking south, and we're trying to hang on to him.”

“Is that why they're keepin' us out here … sir? Just to hassle some poor fucking Russian?” said a voice from the next table.