The Circle (45 page)

He had the feeling he was making a lot of mistakes, even for an ensign. But sooner or later, Slick would foul up, too. He'd just have to be on his ass steady from now on. He thought of Lassard's words on the forecastle.

And when I catch him off base, Dan thought grimly, I've got to ax the bastard.

Before he axes all of us.

*   *   *

LATE that afternoon, the 1MC announced that both evaporators were fixed and water hours were lifted until further notice. He luxuriated in a two-quart shower and his first shave in days.

Second dog, he thought, planting one foot ahead of the other up the bridge ladderwell. Two hours, then seven hours in the bag till the next watch. He wondered what it would be like operating with a carrier. He decided to break out the tactical publications over the next couple of days and bone up on stationkeeping before they rendezvoused.

The daylight had lasted longer today, but when he got topside it was dark again. The seas had dropped even more and the drizzle had cleared. The pilothouse seemed quieter than usual. After a moment, he realized that for the first time in a week the wipers were quiet. The captain was in his chair, head back on the leather headrest at an uncomfortable-looking angle. He was snoring, something Dan hadn't heard him do before.

Silver was standing by the chart table, digging wax out of his ears with the eraser end of a pencil. They discussed the turnover in low tones. Course and speed were unchanged. Dan glanced at Packer. “The old man's still tired,” he muttered.

“He was up writing the after-action report. Then he went down to watch them welding up the feed-water tank. Then he had to answer some more messages. I think he's caught your roommate's cold, too.”

“How could Chow Hound give him a cold? Guy's never on the bridge.”

Silver shrugged. They reported to Evlin, then the jaygee went below.

Dan studied the captain. Packer's mouth gaped. He sounded congested, as if it was hard for him to breathe. His hands twitched on the armrests. Into Dan's mind came a picture of him at the height of the storm: cool, deliberate, unaffected by fear or fatigue. Some things James Packer did puzzled him. Some seemed foolhardy. But he had to admit he was a hell of a seaman.

During his musing, Evlin had drifted to the starboard side of the bridge. The lieutenant reached now to the speaker that monitored the distress frequencies. When he turned it up a hissing roar, like a rain shower on a tin roof, filled the bridge. He turned it down. The captain didn't stir. He turned it up again. The snore faltered. Evlin turned the static down again. After a moment Packer's hands twitched. They crept to his waist, groped for the seat belt. He opened his eyes suddenly.

“What's going on?”

“Sorry, sir, just checking the circuits.”

Packer's eyelids sank again.

“Sir, you had dinner yet? Spaghetti and ice cream tonight.”

A grunt. “What time is it?”

“Eighteen fifteen, sir, second sitting. Mr. Lenson and I have the watch. The scope's clear, visibility's good. Why don't you grab some chow, maybe get your head down in your cabin.”

The captain stretched. He coughed into his handkerchief and blew his nose. Then he searched out his pipe, tucked it in his mouth, and got up. He prowled about the bridge, peered at the barometer, the radarscope, the chart, and then disappeared.

“Captain's off the bridge,” Pettus announced.

“Pretty clever. You do that often?”

“No. You get to know how a CO'll react after a while.”

Dan thought how weary Packer had looked. At his age, fighting a ship through a storm must be ten times as exhausting as it was at twenty-one. He thought then about the captain's family, about what Lassard had told him. Maybe Evlin knew something. But he decided not to ask. The man was entitled to his privacy.

“I wish I could figure out the XO that easy.”

“Our fearless second in command been raking the coals over you?”

“You could say that.” He thought about it for a minute, then sauntered to the radio and tweaked it up again. “Look, I maybe need some advice, sir.”

“I'm listening.”

“I can't seem to get a track on the guy. He doesn't trust anybody. And every time he talks to me, he threatens me at the end, like that's the only thing that'll keep me in line.”

“He doesn't trust me, either. In fact, he thinks I'm crazy. But whatever happens on this other business, I'll be out of the Navy pretty soon. And his fulminations will just be history.

“As far as getting along with him—I just try to remind myself that even Bryce thinks he's on the side of the angels. As long as they're white conservative angels in the proper uniform. And as long as he gets a cut of the poker games in heaven.”

Dan remembered a snowy night, a wad of money, a binocular box on the signal bridge. “I had the feeling something like that was going on. He gets a chunk of the pot?”

“And other things. The anchor pool. Sometimes a man will need extra leave. Cash down helps it along.”

It made a lot of things clearer. Like
Ryan
's lousy morale, and the cynical way the men talked. It made other things less clear, though. “It doesn't seem to bother you very much.”

“I try not to judge him, Dan. He's overage. Passed over for promotion. He'll never make full commander, or have his own ship. He's looking at retirement, and he doesn't know how to do anything but shuffle Navy paper. Here, he's a big deal. On the outside, he'll be nobody. Most evil is motivated by fear.”

“You'd defend anybody, Al.”

“Sure I would. Not their actions, necessarily, but themselves—sure.”

“What's the difference?”

“That goes back to Plato and Paul.” Evlin settled his foot in a nest of cables and Dan grinned, recognizing the start of another session of Metaphysics 101. “Difference between flesh and spirit. You can't deny the influence of early experience, or blood chemistry. But neither can you deny that something in people shines through everything that ought by rights to crush them.

“Deanne works with multiple sclerosis patients. Some of them kids, a lot more old folks—people think MS is a kids' disease, but it gets you more often between thirty and fifty. She manhandles them into the pool. They try to swim. They can hardly move without the water to hold them up. But some of them, she says, have clear, untroubled, liberated souls. The light inside shines through the sickness and age.

“So there's an element of choice involved, too. But deep down, people are better than we realize. Than
they
realize.”

“You're an idealist, Al.”

“Guilty.”

“A mystic.”

Evlin chuckled. “I think I'm a realist. I just define reality in broader terms.” He glanced at the radar, then out the window. “Did you check the running lights when you came on?”

Dan went out on the wings, checked the sidelights, looked up at the masthead and range. He went back inside. “All lights bright lights.”

“Very well.”

“Do you remember what we were talking about before? About how people would act if they believed what you do, that they're not really separate, but all part of the same thing?”

“Yes.”

“That it would be a different world, a better one?”

“You'd hope so,” said Evlin. He set his binoculars for a slow sweep of the sea to starboard. “But in my less sanguine moments, I can also see it interpreted in the sense that since no one's irreplaceable, you could destroy this one or that without really losing anything.

“I think belief has to go beyond dogma. Doctrine's a dead end; it's just accepting metaphors somebody else thought up. It has to be either revealed truth, direct access, or else a conscious, consistent model you arrive at yourself and believe in enough to live by.”

“Have you got this direct access?”

“No.”

“Have you got a model?”

“It's not consistent yet. Or maybe it is, and my mind's too limited to run the program. But I know a few people who have it. I'm going to see if I can get it, too.”

“Even though you'll never be able to prove it exists.”

“Right.”

“Or explain it to me … because you can't communicate that kind of stuff with words, right? So it's still a matter of my accepting your metaphor. On faith.”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Do you believe there's a God?”

“I feel something greater than myself. I don't know if it's ‘alive,' or has a personality. But there's something there.”

“What does it feel like?”

Evlin didn't say anything for a while. In the chartroom the fathometer began chattering as it ran out of paper. Dan could barely hear him as he murmured, “I guess the closest I can come is, evil and good have no meaning to this … power. We can cooperate with it. Or we can fight it. But either way, it's going to win. Because everything's the way it's supposed to be. And everything's going to turn out all right.”

Dan studied the lambent circle of the radar. The beam swept around smoothly, prickled by pinpoints of sea return that were gone when it came round again. But there were always more.

What Evlin was saying had a certain logic. But there was nothing he could see that tied it to the world he knew, a world of conflict and scarcity, of betrayal and pain and loss. It was too easy. No commandments, no judgment after death, no punishment—how could God punish part of Himself? It was unsatisfying. But he didn't want to say this to Evlin. If his weird faith helped him through a court-martial, he had every right to it. He sighed and finished the last of his cold coffee. “Well, two more days, we'll be steaming with
Kennedy.
”

“That's right. They'll probably transfer me off as soon as we join up, then fly me out to the States. There'll be a trial later, probably when you get back to Newport. Officially, I'm restricted to my stateroom, but the captain said I could stand watches if I wanted. Seeing as how we're so short on qualified OODs.”

There it was, the subject he'd so carefully avoided: Evlin's refusal to fire. He didn't know what to say about it. He respected him, but if Evlin wasn't going to obey orders, what was he doing in the Navy? He said, just to say something, “That's what the captain decided?”

“It's not like he has a choice. I refused a direct order in front of witnesses, in a combat situation. He can't let anybody do that and walk.”

“I guess I understand why you did it,” he said carefully. “But, Al—you joined the service. Why? If you felt like that?”

“I didn't then. But that was six years ago. Before I met Deanne and, through her, the Master. I've done a lot of thinking since. I had to get used to the idea that what I thought was important was worthless. I had to replace the idea of success with the idea of usefulness. Finally I concluded I had no place in an organization that exists, when you get down to it, to do violence in the service of the state. That's why I decided to resign.”

“Maybe they'll take that into account. If it's a religious issue, and you—you really thought you were right.” He didn't believe it, though, and he was afraid Evlin could hear it.

When the lieutenant spoke again, his voice had turned brisk, but it was touched, or perhaps Dan only imagined it, with regret. “Well, I did it. I guess I've got to take what comes after.

“Okay, break out the maneuvering boards. Let's see what you know about repositioning bent-line screens.”

20

Latitude 53°–32′ North, Longitude 13°–50′ West: 200 Miles Due West of Ireland

“PULL!”

The disk flicked upward and dwindled swiftly. Quicker than thought, he threw the barrel up and squeezed as the bead steadied. The crack of the twelve-gauge made his ears ring.

The skeet drifted down like a feather from pillows of cumulus scattered across a sky like a blue wool blanket, and settled whole and untouched into the broad road of
Ryan
's wake. “Well, three out of ten, that ain't bad first time out with a scattergun,” said the potbellied gunner's mate. “Want to try her again? Twenty rounds each training allowance.”

“Thanks, Cherry, my shoulder's starting to hurt.”

Dan handed back the riot gun and strolled forward. Inside his head tiny sirens sang only to him. Should have worn earplugs, he thought. As he reached the grills the messmen had set up on the Dash deck, his appetite wavered between the conflicting odors of roasting meat and stack gas. Gulls whirled overhead. He took a paper plate and stood in line past catsup, relish, buns, the stale, tasteless Navy potato chips. He wondered whether they specified them that way, so they'd taste the same after months at sea, like hardtack.

“What you be havin', Mr. L?”

“Double burger, cheese, I guess.”

“Coming right up.”

“Hey there, Ensign.”

When he turned, the seaman recruit was standing right behind him. “Hello, Lassard.”

“Going for that hamburger? Or one of them officers' steaks?”

“Those steaks are for anybody who wants one. You know that.”

“Far-out. Slick'll maybe have one, then. If you're sure nobody'll mind.” Lassard kept grinning. “Got to hand it to you. You really faked him out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making Slick spill his guts, thinking you'd keep the lid on. Yeah, the XO had him in last night about that. Thanks a lot, man.”

He stared at the red-rimmed eyes. “Wait a minute, Slick—I mean, Seaman Recruit Lassard. I didn't tell him anything. You mean Bryce said that I—”

“Slick had you figured for a straight arrow. Well, he just got himself to blame. Hell, Brute Boy could of told him better than to trust the fucking brass.” Lassard hawked noisily and spat on the deck. He pushed past and sauntered toward the grills.