The Ultimate Egoist (7 page)

At long last the day came when all was in readiness. The signal was given, and the country awoke one morning to find itself in the merciless grip of the old régime. The Leader lived! Found by his old physician, who knew him by the scars of his own knife, he lived beyond possibility of doubt. The Leader’s men were in command, and the Leader was coming back!

They went to get him, their beggar-Leader, in his noisome cellar.

They were too late. Fearing him as they served him, they had never told him what they did, and so he had known himself neglected and forgotten—he, a god, a Leader! It was the final humiliation, and he had taken his own life. And so his government died a second death, even as he had—and they were both dead for evermore.

Mr. David Jones, Esq.
Forty Fathoms

Sept. 21, 1938

Dear Sir,

Just a little note to let you know what I think of you.

You’re kicking up your heels a little, my friend. Since when were you a big shot? I’ve been going to sea for quite a while, you piker, and I’ve never had a sample of that far-famed strength of yours. A broken propeller once; but I have a hunch it had been brazed to save expense. Once a started seam; but that was in a thirty-year-old hulk that was headed for the boneyard anyway. Once you caught up with me when my ship was unballasted, threw a squall at her and rolled her over on her beam-ends, tossing me into the ice machines. Lucky punch. Otherwise you’ve muttered and mumbled by way of bragging.

And now it’s a hurricane warning. Am I excited? Not on your life. You can’t even get me seasick. Do your worst, half-pint. Maybe you have sunk a fisherman or two, but you’ll never crack a new seven thousand ton tanker like this. Go ahead. Try it.

Listen to that Miami station, Jones. “The hurricane is now four hundred miles east-southeast of Miami, moving west-northwest at a speed of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. Winds of hurricane velocity near storm center, approximately seventy-five miles in diameter. Small craft are urged to make port immediately. Residents of Miami and coastal environs, check on everything movable. The Board of Health suggests you sterilize your bathtubs and fill them with drinking water, as reservoirs may take sea water. Please take down
all loose boarding. If you live in a wooden house, go at once to the nearest school, where accommodations are being made. If you have any sick or very old, have them removed to the hospital. When the wind rises, see that everyone is accounted for and is indoors. Be sure to leave one door open on the side away from the wind …” Make you feel good, Jones? Well, that’s good enough for landlubbers. But you don’t frighten me. Groundswell’s a little heavier …

You’re getting a kick out of the crew, aren’t you? That Oklahoma bosun, for instance. He’s sitting on the bitts by the galley. He’s in a cold sweat. I’m wise to you, Davy; the kid on the 4 to 8 is wise; and the skipper is wise; but that bosun is fretting like an old maid with the shingles. Just because he had the roof blown away from over his head in the ’34 blow. We are passing plenty of ships; it’s the first time I’ve ever seen loaded tankers headed south. Every time one goes by the bosun starts moaning again, “Why doethn’t the thkipper turn around? Don’t he know there’th a hurricane coming?” and the kid and I sit and laugh at him. It’s the kid’s first trip; he’s out to see the sights. Kick up a show for him, Jones. You don’t want him to go back home and tell the truth about you, do you? Look at him. He’s got his sea-legs now; he’ll be a seaman before he gets his A.B. ticket. Look at him bracing easily against the roll of the ship, with the wind tearing at his hair. Seventeen years old, Davy, and you’re as old as the earth, but that kid has you whipped.

Sept. 22, 1938

Well, small stuff, you’ve succeeded in getting in people’s hair. Landlubber stuff again. Special broadcasts all night; all the crew off-watch spent the night in the messroom listening to them. “… after the wind subsides special squads of police and deputies will cover the streets. If you need assistance wait at your home until one of the squads passes.” Panic seed. You’ve got the bosun so worried that he knocks a man off when we are working on deck, to go back and get the hourly reports. We’re carrying thirty-foot seas now, but we’ve got you fooled. I told you the skipper was wise to you. By the time the blow hits the coast we’ll be a hundred miles north of it.

I can’t figure O’Rourke. He was going to sea before my parents
were born. He’s been through three hurricanes on the coast here, and everything else, running foreign, from a typhoon to a williwaw. Yet when the kid said, “I hope it hits us.
Then
we’ll see some fun!” O’Rourke clipped him. “Wait till ye know what ye’re talking about,” he growled, “before ye open yer young yap again.” The kid stood there rubbing his cheek, pain and shock in his eyes. Then he turned and ran below. I can’t figure it. O’Rourke knows what it’s all about; if you could kill a big-ship sailor, which I doubt, as long as the ship is in good condition, O’Rourke’s typhoons would have got him long ago. And he’s alive, isn’t he? So why should he clip the kid just because the kid has figured out in one trip what it took O’Rourke forty years to learn; that no hurricane is as strong as clean steel?

Sails Carmody is another one. He’s a Boston Irishman, the kid’s watchmate on the 4 to 8. Sails is at the radio for every report, but he never says anything. Each time he hears of another fifty miles less between us and the storm center he frowns more deeply. Yet I saw Sails take on two big Swedes at Evelyn Hardtime’s and whip them both. I saw Sails run up the mast in oilskins in a heavy swell, to clear the signal halliard. He has no nerves. And yet this business has him worried. How can you buffalo a man like that, Jones?

So you decided to take me up on it, did you? That Miami station: “The storm center is reported 180 miles due east of Miami, moving approximately north-northwest. It will therefore not reach the Florida coast.” Shifted north, hey? And will we meet? Let me figure this. If we hold course and speed, my ship and your little hurricane, we should meet a little to the north of Charleston, about 45 miles offshore. Hurry it up, old-timer, or we’ll be there before you and safely north by the time you reach the spot.

Got to give you credit. You are putting on a show for the kid. When he’s on watch at night he doesn’t even go back aft for a smoke when Sails relieves him; just goes to the other wing of the bridge and leans there staring forward. They put the lookout on the bridge two nights ago; you’re wetting down the foc’sle head nicely. The ship knows her way. She’ll bury her nose and take two seas, spouting them up through the hawse-holes, tumbling the chains in the lockers under the windlass; then she’ll shudder like a wrestler bunching
his muscles, shoulder a streaming mantle of sea and spume back on to the foredeck, cut masses of water to ribbons with her bulwarks, and show her decks again. The engines are half-speed; you’ve got us there, old boy. The mill can take only so much; but the hull and those firm clean bulkheads are too much for you. That and the weight of 78,000 barrels of kerosene and furnace oil, and the tons of drums and crates in the fore and after holds.

Sept. 23, 1938

Davy Jones, I acknowledge your strength. It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in the magazine stories. It couldn’t be. But I have found out since early this morning when we hit the first seventy-five mile squall, that wind and sea can be strong enough to tear great strips of paint off the deck; that they can crumple sheet-steel steamguards like cardboard; that they can tear up the welded bases of the kingposts we use for raising tank tops, hurling them over the side. But the ship is tight and bone-dry inside, since we battened down the after hold, dogged the watertight doors, covered the ventilators. And I can still work my away around the poop if I hold to the rail. I can still get up on deck and tell you to your fish face that in me, and in the ship I ride, you have met your match.

You are a murderer.

The third squall passed and we labored like a panting ox reaching the crest of a long hill with his load. The kid and I opened a watertight door on the lee side and slipped out on deck, dogging it behind us. We worked our way to the rail at the break of the poop, stood watching her take every sea. She’d plunge, hiding her bulk. To port and starboard was ocean. At our feet was ocean. Seventy yards away the midship house was an island. Then more ocean. Then the foc’sle head. Behind us the after house was an island. Then she’d heave herself out again, and be a ship again instead of three islands.

Patchy clouds hurtled overhead like stones thrown. One was low, five miles away, broad on the port bow. The moaning in the stays rose an octave, then another as the fourth gale struck. The black cloud paused, whirling, looming up, then charged us, shouting. I
yelled at the kid, “Look out! Come back!” but he never heard me. He stood there riding the deck as if he were a part of it. I vaulted the after cargo manifold, raced over the after hatch, and threw myself down behind the coaming, twisting my fingers around the batten. The rest happened in about three seconds, but it seemed to last forever … the squall swept down and brought twilight with it, and blinding rain; swept past and took the ocean away from under the ship … must have, for she dropped like a stone when the light left her. I saw that sea from where I lay, flat on my belly behind the hatch; saw its crest curling over the top of the foremast. And I saw the kid standing upright, both hands steadying him against the lashing wind, his face upturned to meet that wall of grey-green water. And I felt the ship jar as the midship house took the brunt of it, before I was covered by a great weight of strangling brine. Ages later it passed, and I breathed again, but the kid was gone. There was a white clot on the drum of the winch.

You dirty coward.

You win, Davy Jones. That sea stove in the midship house. Carried away the aerial. Smashed the lifeboats. Tore out the stack. Broke the ship’s back.

There is kerosene and salt on my lips.

T
ERRY HAD BEAUTY
and Florence had brains. Terry was all silk and brilliance, Florence was small and brown and neat. Terry sacrificed clarity to magnificence; Florence sacrificed nothing to cold logic. Therefore Terry was a very popular young lady, and Florence was not. But they were both happy, for they both had what they wanted from life. Popularity meant as little to Florence as did limited scientific recognition to Terry. For Florence was a research scientist, in spite of her mere twenty-odd years, and her paper on the comparative values of certain sub-visible radiations in the vicinity of ultraviolet had brought her wide acclaim in the small circle in which she moved.

They were sisters; and Florence’s steady indifference to men and bright lights and sweet music was a source of constant exasperation to the younger girl. Terry was as analytical as her more serious sister; but to her, the ripples cast by a chance remark, the effect of a half-casual gesture, the reaction to slight nuances of tone and phrase—these were matters of profound interest. Being a woman, and an intensely feminine and beautiful woman at that, she simply could not understand Florence’s passion for her work. When Florence made some new, small discovery, Terry shared her radiant happiness; but she could no more understand
why
Florence was happy than she could grasp the complex scientific phenomenon that had caused that happiness.

Terry’s anxiety about Florence was not returned. In spite of her voluntary seclusion, Florence knew something about the human personality—knew that Terry was following the line for which she was best fitted. She translated the situation into scientific terms for herself, by likening Terry to a color; say, orange. Orange had a place in the spectrum; it occurred between red and yellow. It would be ridiculous
to try to build a spectrum that would show orange between indigo and violet. It would be equally ridiculous to try to move Terry from her proper place in the world: it would not be logical. That last conclusion was all Florence ever needed to convince herself about anything. Logic … in logic, Florence would say, is all the adventure, all the beauty, the glory, the poetry in the universe. Socrates once said that a well-ordered mind, given a single pertinent fact, and time for thought, could visualize the entire universe and all that it contained. It was that sort of mind that was Florence’s ideal: her scientist’s brain told her that her ideal was perfection, and therefore impossible; her realization of this impossibility gave her her brand of yearning, provocative happiness. The search for facts; the logical, symphonic regimentation of those facts into their predetermined patterns; the harmonization of these patterns with contrasting and correlative patterns to take their place in the rhythmic whole; this was her life and her reason for living.

Terry burst into their little apartment one afternoon to find Florence pacing worriedly about, the complete neatness of her bearing marred by a tiny annoyed frown between her eyes.

“Darling! Oh, it’s good to be back! How are you? You’ve been working too hard. I wish you’d—how do I look? See—new shoes. Boa. Oh Florence, I met the most marvelous man! He’s
just
your type. Look, we can arrange a little party. We’ll get you a nice fluffy organdy. Powder-blue. He talks beautifully about the most amazing things. His name’s Ben. Youngish, with a face like a very nice horse. Frightfully clever. Ph.D. and all that. Oh dear, your hair’s all straggly. If only you’d let me set it—just once; you’d see how it would be—what have you been doing all this time?”

Florence smiled. Sometimes she almost envied Terry her bewildering personality, the vibrant dynamism with which she attacked life. Look at this; a weekend house party; three days of no doubt violent exercise; probably no little wear and tear on her emotional setup; yet she was as fresh and crisp-looking as a frozen lettuce leaf. “I’ve been trying the impossible and learning a great deal from it,” she said. “I’ve a suspicion that the velocity of light is not, after all, a constant. I think that there are greater speeds in the deep ultraviolet.
That’s why I have this new gear-wheel light-interrupter; but it will take some close figuring. Any difference will be fractional—
very
small. I can’t do a thing until I get that new rheostat. The one I’ve got is too clumsy; I haven’t control enough. It’s like the old gag about a drugstore sandwich: the first bite and you haven’t reached the filling, the next bite and you’re past it. When they get around to delivering the new ’stat—it’s a micro-vernier, variable to three twenty-five thousandths of—”