Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [44]
“Didn’t Carmody take you around the ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, just write down what he told you, in diagram form.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Willie.
Adams left the two ensigns to themselves. Harding murmured wearily, “What say? Want to start on it?”
“Do you remember anything Carmody said?”
“Just one thing. ‘Climb that mast.’ ”
“Well, it’s due first thing in the morning,” Willie said. “Let’s have a go at it.”
They collaborated over a sketch, blinking and yawning, with frequent arguments about details. At the end of an hour their work looked like this:
Willie sat back and examined it critically. “I think that does it-”
“Are you crazy, Keith? There are about forty compartments we have to stick in a label-”
“I don’t remember any of those bloody compartments-”
“Neither do I. Guess we’ll just have to go around the ship again-”
“What, for another three hours? Man, I’ll get a heart attack. I’m failing fast. Look, my hands are shaking-”
“Anyway, Keith, the whole thing’s out of proportion. It looks like some misbegotten tugboat-”
“It is.”
“Look, I have an idea. There must be blueprints of this ship somewhere. Why don’t we just get hold of them and- It’s not cricket maybe but-”
“Say no more! You’re a genius, Harding! That’s it. We’ll do exactly that. First thing in the morning. Me for the Black Hole.”
“Right with you.”
Outside the clip shack, under a brilliant yellow floodlight, some civilian yard workers were burning with blowtorches and sawing and banging at the deck, installing a new life-raft rack. Harding said, “How the devil can we sleep with that going on?”
“I could sleep,” said Willie, “if they were doing all that to me instead of to the deck. Let’s go.” He stepped into the shack and backed out, coughing like a consumptive. “Ye gods!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Go in there and take a breath-a shallow one.”
The shack was full of stack gas. A shift in the wind was wafting the fumes from number-three stack directly into the little hut, where, having no place to go, they stayed and fermented. Harding took a sniff at the doorway and said, “Keith, it’s suicide to sleep in there-”
“I don’t care,” Willie said desperately, pulling off his shirt, “I’d just as lief die, all things considered.”
He crept into his bunk, holding his nose, and Harding followed. For a couple of hours he tossed and thrashed in an eerie doze full of nightmares, wakened every few minutes by a burst of clattering from the workmen. Harding passed into a dead stupor. At midnight the workmen quit, but the sudden quiet and gloom brought no relief; it merely made Willie more conscious of the heat, and of the stinking miasma of the stack gas. He staggered out on deck in his drawers, stumbled down to the wardroom, and passed out on the couch. His body was covered with soot.
And again-and this was to be his most characteristic experience aboard the Caine, and his longest memory of it-he was being shaken out of his sleep. Lieutenant Adams was standing over him, dressed for a watch with gun belt and pistol, sipping coffee. Willie sat up. Through the porthole he saw black night.
“Bear a hand, Keith. We’ve got the four-to-eight.”
Willie went back to the clipping shack, got into his clothes, and dragged himself to the quarterdeck. Adams gave him a gun belt, showed him the leather-bound logs and battered Watch Officers’ Guide which were kept in a rickety tin desk by the gangway, and introduced him to the quartermaster and messenger of the watch, two sleepy sailors in dungarees. The clock on the desk under the shaded yellow electric bulb read five past four. All the ships in the nest were dark and still. “The four-to-eight is a pretty routine watch,” said Adams. “That’s good.” Willie yawned.
“I don’t know,” said the gunnery officer, “but what I’ll lay below till reveille. Think you can handle it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fine. There’s nothing to it, really, except making damn sure none of your watch-standers sit down or fall asleep standing up. There are guards on the fo’c’sle and the fantail. Okay?”
“I got it,” said Willie, saluting.