CV

52

Early in the morning the hospital annex called and told Bliss that Dr. McNulty had awakened. Bliss went down an hour later and found him looking weak and bewildered. "How do you feel. Doctor?”

“Got a sore nose,” said McNulty. “Now I know what it feels like. I was dreaming. I dreamed—” He closed his eyes.

Later in the day Bliss dropped in again; McNulty was looking more alert.

“Doctor, we’ve missed you badly. While you were ill, we’ve been playing cat and mouse with a helicopter carrier— they want to take off our Very Important Passengers.”

“They can’t do that.”

“I know, and I’ve been able to stave them off so far, but it can’t go on forever. Our only chance is to get rid of the parasite somehow in the next few days. If anything at all occurs to you—”

McNulty shook his head. His eyes filled with tears; Bliss, embarrassed, went away.

Paul Newland realized that his deliverance was not far off. He was very weak now, and he slid down into a fuzzy half-consciousness every now and then, but in the intervals his mind seemed clear enough. He had written a note to Hal, and another one to Olivia Jessup. He had gone over his life in memory, as drowning people were supposed to do, and had made his peace with it. There were things he had done that he might do otherwise now if he had the opportunity, but they had been the best things he knew how to do at the time.

It really was quite easy to die; he would have preferred not to do it all by himself, perhaps, but that was a minor complaint. He did not expect anything afterward: he believed that his personality was a unique set of wave forms which after the dissolution of his brain would fade into the background noise of the universe. He was grateful to have had the use of this body and this mind for sixty-four years; he had realized long ago that he did not want it forever.

He was quite sure now that John Stevens must have put him into the lifeboat, perhaps on orders from Bronson’s group. He felt no vindictiveness, only a kind of melancholy regret. The world was going to turn without him. Probably Sea Venture would not survive; perhaps the L-5 program would. Was that a good thing or not? He no longer knew.

He awoke from one of his periods of half-consciousness and knew that the time had come. I’m not sorry for anything, he thought, and drifted away into the long dark.

By midaftemoon heavy swells were overtaking Sea Venture from the east; the barometer was falling. At seventeen hundred hours. Bliss ordered the upper decks cleared and Sea Venture submerged to fifty feet.

Hartman was standing with Bliss and Deputy Davis in the Control Center after dinner. He could feel a faint but perceptible rise and fall of the deck under his feet.

“Why this particular depth, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Navigational problems,” Bliss said. “We could easily get a smoother ride by going a bit deeper, but the deeper we go, the more northing, and we’re already far north of where we ought to be. Excuse us a moment, Davis.”

“Yes, sir.” The deputy stepped aside.

“Here we are,” said Bliss, pointing to the red dot in the center of the display. He pushed a button. “Here’s our projected course for the next twenty-four hours. As you see, we’re going to pass between Rota and Tinian, and that’s bad enough, but farther north the currents are a nightmare, and there’s a risk of being carried into a sort of mini-gyre south of Kyushu.”

“That’s the drawback of steering by currents, then, isn’t it?”

“Quite right, and it would.be much safer to cruise these waters in the summer, but then we wouldn’t get the tourist trade, so there you are.”

“Well, the carrier will never find us in this weather, at least. That’s something.”

“Yes,” said Bliss gloomily.

He played a game with Hartman and went to bed, but did not sleep; he lay and watched the illuminated inertial guidance repeater opposite his bed. After an hour and a half the motion of the vessel was much worse. He picked up the phone.

“Control Center.”

“Womack, take her down to seventy feet.”

“Yes, sir.”

Presently the motion moderated again. For there to be any at all at this depth, the waves at the surface must be a hundred feet tall. Bliss wondered where the carrier was and if it had managed to get out of the storm path.

Down here, they were blind and deaf; the inertial guidance was all they had. Up there, it was a nightmare of wind and wave.

Bliss was aware that he had done all that a man could, and more than he had expected of himself. And it was all for nothing, because he couldn’t isolate the parasite and he couldn’t kill it. For a long time he had clung to the unreasonable hope that Dr. McNulty would think of something when he. recovered. Now he could not deceive himself any longer. In another twenty hours his supply of chemicals would run out and he would be unable to submerge; then the helicopter would land and take the passengers off: mate in one.

At oh-five-hundred he got up, shaved and dressed, and went to the Control Center. He spoke to the security guards at the door, crossed the anteroom and went in.

"That’s all right, Davis, you’re relieved. Go and get some sleep, or whatever you like.”

“Sir?”

“I said you’re relieved. Go home; that’s an order.”

The young man stood up slowly and left the room. Bliss went and tapped the communications man on the shoulder; he looked up, raising the earphones. “You’re relieved,” Bliss said. “Go on, get out.”

When they were both gone, Bliss locked the door and sat down for the last time in the command chair.

Never in his professional career had he had to make a decision like this. It was not his style at all; he was an administrator, not one of your Yankee skippers quelling mutinies with a marlinspike or bringing his ship through a gale around Cape Hom. But he was squarely against it now: there were no longer two choices, only one.

He looked at the inertial guidance display on the console. Their position was a little more than three miles due east of Rota. He waited and watched the chronometer, then pressed the buttons to bring Sea Venture to the surface.

Great tub that she was, she would break up like a house of cards if he ran her ashore in this weather. He had a glimpse of bulkheads collapsing, water rushing down the corridors like a gray fist.

As he waited, he felt a vague dissatisfaction, a feeling of something unfinished. It was too bad about the radio; he would have liked to try to get a call through to his wife, just to say good-bye.