CV

45

At twelve hundred hours the next day, when Bliss was just sitting down to a solitary lunch, his phone buzzed.

“Yes?”

It was his secretary’s voice. “Mr. Bliss, we have an incoming video call from the President.”

“Oh, God,” said Bliss. He got up and went to the desk phone, turned it on. The image of an earnest crop-haired young man appeared on the screen.

“Ah, Captain Bliss? Will you hold, please, for the President of the United States?”

“I will, yes.”

Several minutes passed; then the famous features appeared on the screen.

“Captain Bliss, as you know, I’ve been hearing a great many expressions of concern about your situation, and I want you to know that I’m ordering the aircraft carrier Bluefields to leave station and rendezvous with you sometime tomorrow. They will be searching for your missing lifeboat, and they’ll be carrying a group of Navy doctors and nurses as well as a detachment of Marines to keep order in Sea Venture, and you’ll get every aid and assistance we can possibly give you.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“And, Captain Bliss, the Bluefields will also have orders to take off as many passengers as they can who are not affected by the disease. We’ll send you a list of those passengers later today, and this is a tentative list, and you can add to it from those passengers who want to go, up to the limit of what the Bluefields can carry.”

“Mr. President, may I ask what will be done with the passengers?”

“Yes’, you certainly may, and I was coming to that. They will be kept in quarantine on the Bluefields, of course, until our medical people are sure everything is all right, and then they’ll be taken to Guam.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“That’s all right, Captain Bliss, and if there’s anything else we can do for you, I want you to call my office, night or day, at any time. Now I’m going to let you get back to your duties, Captain, and I want you to know that our prayers are going out to you.”

“More trouble on the stricken Sea Venture.” said the anchorperson, looking gravely at the camera. “While a helicopter carrier steams to the rescue, a famous passenger, Paul Newland, mysteriously disappears. We’ll have these and other stories after this message.”

That evening over dinner with Hartman, Bliss said, “I’m at my wit’s end, frankly. We’ve tried everything on earth, and it’s all been a disaster. Now the thing’s got off the lifeboat. That couldn’t have happened, but it did. And the worst of it is that it’s got McNulty, and Jacobs too. Jacobs was going to build us a gadget, to spray the thing with radio frequencies and so on while it’s between victims.”

“Do you think it took Jacobs to keep him from making the gadget?”

“Or to make us think that was the reason. Well, mustn't be depressing. Try this claret.”

Hartman took a sip, tried not to let his opinion show on his face. “Very nice.”

“It’s all up to me, you know,” Bliss said. “I wish it had been anybody else.”

“It is a bit of a quandary, isn’t it?” said Hartman. “You can’t let anybody off Sea Venture until you’ve got rid of the parasite, but on the other hand you can’t keep them here forever.”

“My masters have instructed me to let a carrier take off certain selected passengers. I can’t do it. If the thing once gets onto a ship that carries helicopters, there’ll be no holding it.”

“No, I see that. I suppose in the end it’s going to come down to heroic measures. Nelson at Copenhagen, that sort of thing.”

“There's the rub. I’m not a hero.”

“No, well, none of us are until it comes to the point, are we?"