Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [193]
Willie’s feelings were very much those of the crowd. With the coffee warm in his stomach he began to sense the exhilaration of being in a tight spot, and unafraid. He recovered enough presence of mind to apply some of his lore from the American Practical Navigator to the storm, and calculated that the center was about a hundred miles due east, approaching at twenty miles an hour. He even looked forward with some pleasure to the possibility that the calm eye of the storm might pass over the Caine; he wondered whether a ring of blue sky would be visible in the black heavens.
“I hear you’re going to relieve me instead of Paynt.” Harding had come up to him unobserved as he faced the wind and made calculations.
“Sure. Shall I take over now?”
“Like that?”
Willie looked down at himself, naked except for sopping trousers, and grinned. “Slightly out of uniform, hey?”
“I don’t know that the situation calls for dress blues with sword,” said Harding, “but you might be more comfortable with clothes on.”
“Be right back.” Willie went down and slipped through the hatchway scuttle, noticing that the sailors were gone from the main deck passageways. He found Whittaker and the steward’s mates in the wardroom, all in life jackets, laying a white tablecloth, straightening out the chairs, and picking tumbled magazines off the deck. Whittaker said to him mournfully, “Suh, I dunno how we gonna have breakfast less’n I get some tin trays offen general mess. We ain’t got enough crockery left but for maybe two officers, suh”
“Hell, Whittaker, I think you can forget about breakfast down here. Check with Mr. Maryk. I think sandwiches and coffee topside is all anybody expects.”
“Thank you, suh!” The faces of the colored boys brightened. Whittaker said, “You, Rasselas, belay settin’ dat table. You go ask the man like Mr. Keith says-”
It amused Willie to consider, as he struggled to dress in his galloping room, that the issue of the morning had dwindled so quickly from life-or-death to a question of the wardroom’s breakfast. He was cheered by the steward’s mates’ solemn persistence in routine, and by the quiet yellow-lit sameness of his room. Down here he was Willie Keith, the old immortal, indestructible Willie, who wrote letters to May Wynn and decoded messages and audited laundry statements. The typhoon topside was a sort of movie adventure, exciting and mock-dangerous, and full of interest and instruction, if only he could remember to keep his head. He thought someday he might write a short story about a typhoon, and use the touch of the steward’s mates worrying about breakfast. He went back to the bridge, dry and buoyant, and relieved the deck. He stood in the pilothouse, safe from the flying spray, his elbow hooked around the captain’s chair, and grinned into the teeth of the typhoon, which wailed louder than ever, “OOOO! EEEEE!”
The barometer stood at 29.05.
CHAPTER 30
The Mutiny
A steamship, not being a slave to the wind like a sailing vessel, is superior to ordinary difficulties of storms. A warship is a special kind of steamship, built not for capaciousness and economy, but for power. Even the minesweeper Caine could oppose to the gale a force of some thirty thousand horsepower; energy enough to move a weight of half a million tons one foot in one minute. The ship itself weighed little more than a thousand tons. It was a gray old bantam bursting with strength for emergencies.
But surprising things happen when nature puts on a freak show like a typhoon, with wind gusts up to a hundred and fifty miles per hour or more.