Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [145]
“Here she comes,” someone said. A trim gig appeared around the bow of a transport and clove through the muddy water toward the Caine. A rustling sigh passed through the watchers, as through an audience at a transition moment of a play. Whittaker and a steward’s mate came through the port passageway, carrying a weather-beaten wooden foot locker with two blue canvas handbags piled on it. Rabbitt emerged on the quarterdeck behind them. He blinked in amazement at the crowd. The officers shook hands with him one by one. The sailors stood with their thumbs hooked in their belts, or their hands in their pockets. A few of them called out, “So long, Mr. Rabbitt.”
The gig clanged to a stop beside the sea ladder. Rabbitt went up to Willie and saluted. His lips were sharply pressed together, and his eyes were winking nervously. “Request permission to leave the ship, sir.”
“Permission granted, sir,” said Willie, and added impulsively, “You don’t know what you’re getting out of.”
Rabbitt grinned, pressed Willie’s hand, and went down the ladder. The gig pulled away. Willie, at the gangway desk, looked at the array of backs lined along the rail. They reminded him of shabby spectators roped off at the entrance to a wedding. He went to the rail himself, and gazed after Rabbitt. The gig disappeared around the transport. There was only the fading foamy curve of the wake.
Within the hour Captain Queeg threw a fearful tantrum. Paynter brought him a fuel and water report which showed that the crew’s consumption of water had risen ten percent during the Kwajalein operation. “They’re forgetting the value of water, hey? Kay, Mr. Paynter,” the captain shrieked. “No water for officers’ and crew’s personal use for forty-eight hours! Maybe that’ll show ’em I mean business, here!”
The Caine weighed anchor half an hour later, and headed out of Kwajalein Lagoon, bound for Funafuti.
CHAPTER 22
The Water Famine
In the days of sail, a following wind was a blessing; not so in the days of steam.
En route to Funafuti, two hundred miles out of Kwajalein, the Caine was wallowing along at ten knots under masses of clouds like vast dirty pillows. It was enveloped in its own miasma, from which it could not escape. The breeze blew from astern at about ten knots. Relative to the ship there was no movement of air at all. The minesweeper seemed to be traveling in a nightmare calm. The stack gas swirled and rolled on the main deck, sluggish, oily, almost visible. It stank; it coated tongues and throats with an itchy, foul-tasting film; it stung the eyes. The air was hot and damp. The smell of the crated cabbages on the after deckhouse made a singularly sickening marriage with the stack fumes. The sailors and officers of the Caine, sweating, dirty, unable to obtain the relief of a shower, looked at each other with lolling tongues and dulled sad eyes, and worked with their hands to their noses.
The Caine and a destroyer-escort were screening six LST’s, lumbering fat shells more than three hundred feet long, shaped like wooden shoes, and withal strangely frail-looking; a determined assault with a can opener, one felt, on one of these paunchy hulls might bring about the abandon-ship alarm. The LST’s wobbled over the waves at eight knots, and the zigzagging escorts went slightly faster.
Queeg’s water ban was about twenty-four hours old when Maryk presented himself in the captain’s cabin. The Caine’s commanding officer lay flat on his back in his bunk, naked. Two fans, buzzing at full speed, blew streams of air down on him; nevertheless sweat stood in beads on his white chest. “What is it, Steve?” he said, not moving.
“Captain, in view of the extraordinary wind conditions, how about securing the water regulations after one day instead of two? Paynter tells me we’ve got plenty to last us until Funafuti-