Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [55]
“Heresy, heresy,” Willie said, rather startled and embarrassed.
“Not at all. Plain fact. Whether it’s the fragment of coding, the fragment of engineering, the fragment of gunnery-you’ll find them all predigested and regulated to a point where you’d have to search the insane asylums to find people who could muff the jobs. Remember that one point. It explains, and reconciles you to, all the Navy Regulations, and all the required reports, and all the emphasis on memory and obedience, and all the standardized ways of doing things. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, ‘How would I do this if I were a fool?’ Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you’ll never go wrong- Well, that cleans up brother Carmody’s traffic, he added, pushing aside the heap of despatches. “Want me to do yours?”
“No, thank you, sir- You’re pretty bitter about the Navy-”
“No, no, Willie,” said Keefer earnestly. “I approve of the whole design. We need a navy, and there’s no other way to run one in a free society. It simply takes a little time to see the true picture, and I’m passing on to you the fruits of my analysis. You have wit and background. You’d come to the same conclusion in a few months. Remember Socrates’ slave who worked out the pons asinorum with a stick in the sand? A fact of nature emerges by itself after a while. It would come pretty quickly to you.”
“So that’s your pons asinorum of shipboard life? ‘The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.’ “
“An excellent demonstration,” Keefer smiled, nodding, “of obedient memory, Willie. You’ll be a naval officer yet.”
A few hours later Willie was on the bridge again with Maryk for the noon-to-four watch. Captain de Vriess dozed in his narrow chair on the starboard side of the pilothouse. The remains of his lunch in a tin tray rested on the deck under the chair: a broken corn muffin, fragments of Swiss steak, and an empty coffee mug. The weather was clear and hot, the sea choppy with whitecaps. The Caine rolled and creaked, cutting across the troughs of the waves at fifteen knots. A telephone buzzed. Willie answered it.
“Forward fireroom requests permission to blow tubes,” croaked the phone. Willie repeated the request to Maryk.
“Granted,” said the OOD, after a glance at the fluttering flag on the mast. There was a rumble from the stacks and inky smoke billowed out and floated away perpendicularly to leeward. “Good time to blow tubes,” said Maryk. “Wind on the beam. Carries the soot well clear. Sometimes you have to change course to get the wind right. Then you ask the skipper’s permission.”
The ship took a long steep roll. The rubber mats on the wheelhouse deck slid in a heap to one side. Willie clung to a window handle as the quartermaster rescued the mats. “Sure rolls with the wind on the beam,” he observed.
“These buckets roll in drydock,” said Maryk. “Lot of freeboard forward and too much weight aft. All that sweep gear. Pretty poor stability. Wind on the beam really pushes her over.” He strolled out on the starboard wing, and Willie followed him,