"Then why don't you?" Williams said angrily, feeling the blood rise in his face. "Don't do me any favors."
Bullitt laughed. "You're tougher than I thought, boy," he said, using the familiar address for the first time, and arousing in Williams a quick response of withdrawal and distaste. "I thought you were like all the other weak sisters on board. I thought you had to be ltl{ed. Don't think I don't know why McNulty has been sucking around here. I know his kind. I thought you were an ass, but I suppose it's just because you're so high class. Tell me, did you have to resign from the four hundred before you could go into the Navy as an enlisted man?"
"You'd better stop now, Chief," Williams said tightly, jabbing at the cotton cloth with his needle. "I don't like your talk."
Bullitt laughed again, as if pleased that he had drawn blood. "I am going to leave this ship, boy," he said, "but in my own good time. Do you think the Bureau would let me go into action to be killed with all you yard birds?"
Williams stopped his sewing and looked at Bullitt with silent astonishment.
"War is for civilians," Bullitt said in a tone of contempt. "War is for the faceless herd who go to the slaughter like sheep. Do you think it matters about you? No one will ever miss you. You're all expendable. But how the hell do you think they could run this war, boy, if they lost old hands like me?" He thrust the towel he had been working on aside, savagely, and picked up another length of cloth and began on that.
"Did they send me out with Zebra?" he asked, looking up at Williams. "You know about Activity Zebra, don't you?"
"Yes, Chief, I do," Williams said.
"And if they wouldn't risk me on Zebra, do you think they'd send me out into the Atlantic on a miserable tin can?"
Williams could say nothing. He bent his head, and went on with his sewing, automatically.
"I'm almost sorry for you," Bullitt said. "But of course," he went on, assuming his tone of elaborate mockery, "not all of us are given the chance to be heroes." He put aside the new towel, stood up and went to the autoclave. He spun the handle, opened the door, and peered into the steam like Mephistopheles at the brink of hell. "So, you didn't go along with the little plot, did you?" he asked.
"No, damn it," Williams said sharply. "No, I did not."
"It won't be a picnic, boy," Bullitt said, poking gingerly at the steaming operating packs inside the autoclave, and beginning to remove them, carefully. "You won't have any time for happy hour with your little playmates out on deck. I'm going to work your tail off, but you and I will show these fools how a job can be done."
"You make it sound delightful, Chief," Williams said.
"I'm not sure what will happen after I go," Bullitt went on, unmoved by Williams' sarcasm. "They're scraping so near the bottom of the barrel now that they may send you some drugstore cowboy all dressed up like a chief pharmacist's mate. Or," he shrugged, "you may have to go it alone. You, and Doctor Claremont. That combination should bring restful sleep to all hands on board."
Bullitt had emptied the autoclave now. He went to a lower shelf of a cabinet and took out a pillow case, knotted at the top, from which, after unknotting, he removed potatoes and eggs and lemons. "We won't take time out for chow," he said. He put the potatoes and eggs in the autoclave, spun the door shut, and turned the steam valve. Then he took a beaker from a shelf, cut two lemons in half, squeezed the juice into the beaker, threw the squeezed rinds in after that, and, after unlocking the cabinet where the drugs and alcohol were kept, reached for the bottle of alcohol and poured a liberal amount into the beaker. Meanwhile, he went on talking. "We are going to Guantanamo Bay after we leave here," he said. "We will be there for six weeks, for gunnery practice and maneuvers. Then we will go back to Norfolk to await orders." He had stirred the mixture in the beaker with a glass rod, and now he took down two smaller beakers from the shelf, and poured the mixture into these. "At least you will await orders," he said. "I will pick up my new orders from the Bureau —although no one but you must know that now. Oh, well," he said, handing Williams a beaker, and raising his own, "you who are about to die, we salute you."
Williams took the beaker mechanically, and while he sat there holding It the top half of the sick-bay door was flung open, and there was the unsmiling face of McNulty. It was Bullitt who spoke first. "I'd stay well if I were you. Boatswain's Mate First Class McNulty," he said. "For some men it doesn't pay to get sick."
"I'd like to see you. Doc," McNulty said, addressing Williams, pushing his hat back from his expressionless face.
Williams followed him out onto the deck, where they stood at the rail in the early twilight. "Have you made up your mind yet, Doc?" McNulty asked. "We only got a day or so left."
Williams' thoughts were too confused to permit him to speak at once. Was Bullitt right in what he said.^ With his ignorance of Navy ways, Williams would have to accept the possibility that he was. And if he was right, if he was going to be transferred from the Ajax before they went into action, then Williams needed him aboard, no "matter how unpleasant he was, no matter how disliked he was. For Bullitt was the most efficient, the most knowledgeable chief pharmacist's mate that he had ever worked under, and he needed to know absolutely everything Bullitt could teach him.
"I can't do it, Boats," Williams said. "I just can't do it."
McNulty spat into the water. "Okay, Doc," he said, in a level tone, his face set. "Okay."
"I'm sorry," Williams said. "I'm sorry as hell."
McNulty turned to go, but he spoke over his shoulder before he walked away. "If I were you. Doc," he said, "I wouldn't stand there on the deck with that glass in my hand."
Williams looked down, absently, at the beaker in his hand, at the disorder of cranes and derricks on the dock.
McNulty had reached the microphone of the public-address system of the ship. The lonely, personal note of his boatswain's pipe sounded through the dusk. "Now hear this," he called. "Now hear this. Sweepers man your brooms. Sweepers man your brooms. Clean sweep down fore and aft."
Williams threw the beaker from him. It smashed into fragments against a stanchion of the dock.
Chapter 4
TWO DAYS later the Ajax sailed from Boston. When the crew mustered on deck, the ship was already under way and conditions were by no means pleasant. A chill, wet wind blew in from the port side, the sky w^as lowering and gray, with thunderclouds overhead, the water of the outer harbor was choppy, and ahead of them lay the open sea, flecked with the whitecaps of great rolling waves. Back in the sick bay after muster, Bullitt was busy securing all loose gear. There was apparent in his manner a change in his attitude toward Williams, an implicit suggestion that he had accepted him now, not on Williams' terms, but on his own, as if it would never occur to him that Williams' terms, whatever they were, had validity in themselves. And Williams was depressed by this; it came to him, for perhaps the first time in his life, that in some instances a position of neutrality or disinterested justice is impossible, that any stand is a decision, and that what he had done, in effect, was to accept Bullitt himself, and, by so doing, reject McNulty and the others.
"When we hit the open sea they'll all be sick," Bullitt said briskly. "It's bad enough after liberty in any weather, but this will be marvelously hideous. However," he said, scooping up an armful of the operating packs that had been taken from the autoclave, and putting them away into a lower cabinet, "don't call me. I'll be below having the vapors. When they come to you, gasping and retching, just stack them up in the passageway like cordwood. But under no circumstances try to do anything for them, unless you want to just throw them over the side."