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By Root 4548 0

with which he doped himself to beguile the tedium and deaden the pain of Queeg’s nagging. He knew his letters were queerly evasive and contradictory; but such as they were, he sent them off. In return, in the rare times when the minesweeper encountered a fleet post office, he would get batches of warm happy letters from May, which at once intoxicated and worried him. She gave herself completely to him in these letters, and followed his silent treatment of the subject of marriage. In this strange love affair on paper Willie found himself becoming more and more attached to May and at the same time increasingly aware that he was being unjust to her. But the dreamworld was too precious an anodyne to be broken up; and so he persisted in his fervid pointless love letters.

CHAPTER 25

A Medal for Roland Keefer

On October 1, with Captain Queeg still in command, the old minesweeper steamed into Ulithi Atoll, an atoll like any other atoll, a ragged ring of islands, reefs, and green water, halfway between Guam and the newly captured Palaus. As the captain was maneuvering the nose of the ship into the center of the anchoring berth, Willie, yawning on the starboard wing, felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Keefer, pointing off to the right, said, “Willie dear, look yonder and tell me it’s a hallucination.”

A thousand yards away an LST, painted with brown-and-green tropic camouflage, was anchored. Tied to the open ramp at the bow were three sixty-ton target sleds. Willie said sadly, “Oh, Christ, no.”

“What do you see?” said Keefer.

“Targets. That’s why we were sent down to this hole, no doubt.” The despatch ordering the Caine to proceed from Eniwetok to Ulithi alone at high speed had been the subject of extended guessing in the wardroom.

“I am going below to fall on my sword,” said the novelist.

The weary old Caine went back to work, hauling targets around the open sea near Ulithi for the fleet’s gunnery practice. Day after day, dawn found the ship steaming out of the channel with the sled, and dusk was usually purple over the atoll before it dropped anchor again. The effect of this on Captain Queeg was marked. In the first couple of days of target-towing he was more irascible and cantankerous than ever. The pilothouse echoed with his screeches and curses. Then he fell into a comatose condition. He turned over the conning of the ship entirely to Maryk, even to weighing anchor in the morning and steaming into the channel at night. Occasionally in fog or rain he would come to the bridge and take the conn. Otherwise he lay in his bunk, day and night, reading, or playing with a jigsaw puzzle, or staring.

Personal to Lieutenants Keefer and Keith. Greetings, sweepers. How about coming over tonight? I have the duty. Roland.

The Caine, returning to Ulithi in the sunset, received this blinker message from a carrier far up in the lagoon, one of a large number which had come in during the day and now were crowded at the north end of the anchorage, a mass of oblong shapes, black against the red sky. Willie, who had the deck, sent the boatswain’s mate to fetch Keefer. The novelist came to the bridge when the Caine’s anchor was splashing into the water. “What is that lucky clown doing on the Montauk?” Keefer said, peering through binoculars at the carriers. “Last I heard he was on the Belleau Wood.”

“When was that?” Willie said.

“I don’t know-five, six months ago. He never writes.”

“He just commutes from carrier to carrier, I guess.”

Keefer’s face twisted in a wry grin. The evening breeze stirred his lank black hair. “I could almost believe,” he said, “that BuPers is deliberately and systematically insulting me. I have put in about seventeen requests for transfer to a carrier- Well. Think we can risk a reply without bothering Queeg? The answer is no, of course, don’t bother saying it. Guess I’ll have to pay a visit to Grendel’s cave. Christ, it’s been a year since we saw Rollo last in Pearl, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. Seems longer.”

“Rather. This cruise under Queeg seems to me to be lasting about as long as the Renaissance.