Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [187]
“Well, this time of year-”
Maryk lit a cigar and went out on the wing. He leaned his elbows on the bulwark, enjoying the contentment of unexpected relief from a trivial chore. He knew Willie Keith would plot the warnings reliably. The pressure from below of a junior officer soberly reaching for more responsibility gave the executive officer a pleasant sense of the fruitfulness of time. He remembered Willie as he had been in his first days on the Caine, a baby-faced, flip ensign, callow and careless, pouting at Captain de Vriess like a spanked child. “De Vriess had Willie’s number, though,” Maryk thought. “He told me right off he would be okay after his behind had been kicked bloody.”
Willie appeared beside him. “All plotted.”
“Very well.” Maryk puffed at his cigar.
The communications officer leaned on the bulwark, looking out at the anchorage. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” he said. “I never get tired of looking at it. That’s power.”
Next morning the big ships steamed out to sea. The Caine tagged along, dragging its target, and for a merry day and night the Third Fleet, division by division, took turns at gunfire practice while advancing westward. Then the minesweeper turned back with its tattered burden, and the task force went on to strike at the airfields of the Philippines. Ulithi looked deserted and shabby when the Caine returned; a reviewing stand after the parade, a ballroom after the ball. Only the service ships were left-oilers, minesweepers, and some concrete supply barges, and the ever-present ugly landing craft. Jellyfish were battening on the drifting garbage of the great ships that were gone.
Down splashed the anchor, and dull days went by, while Willie followed the exploits of Halsey’s force in the Fox schedule despatches. His only other diversion was keeping up the typhoon chart.
Willie had been in some of the dirty weather which swirls around the edges of typhoons, but he had never steamed through one. His picture of these whirlwinds was therefore a mingling of half-remembered pages of Conrad and some recently studied sections of the American Practical Navigator. On the one hand he retained the immortal image of the squeaking Chinese passengers rolling from one end of a black hold to another in a single fluid lump, accompanied by loose bouncing, clinking silver dollars. On the other hand he knew that typhoons started as a result of a collision of warm air and cold air: the warm air rose like a bubble in a tub, the cold air rushed into the resulting void, a twist was imparted to the path of the cold air by the earth’s rotation, and so you had a rotating windstorm. He wasn’t exactly sure why they rotated in opposite directions north and south of the equator; nor why they mostly happened in the fall; nor why they moved northwest in a parabolic path. But he had noticed that the account in the American Practical Navigator closed with an apologetic muttering to the effect that certain aspects of typhoons had never been satisfactorily explained. This gave him an excuse not to bother his head about the scientific account too much. He memorized the methods for locating the direction and distance of the center, and the rules of seamanship for the left and right semicircles; and these he puzzled through until he saw the logic of them. Thereafter he considered himself an informed mariner on the subject.
He knew, in fact, almost as much as one can know about typhoons without having been through one. It was as much as an innocent divinity student, feeling obliged to learn something about sin in order to fight it, might find out by reading Ulysses and the poems of Baudelaire.
The monotony was broken by an action despatch flashed to the Caine one afternoon from the beach: not a target-towing order, but a screening assignment with tankers which were to rendezvous with the Third Fleet for refueling at sea. The prospect of quasi-combat service stirred up some gaiety in the languid crew. The officers, too, perked up. They indulged in hideous part-singing that night after dinner, concluding with the sailors