Bullitt sat down in the aluminum chair like a potentate assuming his throne of state. He turned his brown, ugly face up to McNulty with an air of calculated insolence. "Sick call is at eight o'clock," he said.
McNulty slowly stepped out into the passageway and stood there, looking back at Bullitt.
"Oh, and by the way, Boatswain's Mate First Class McNulty," Bullitt said, "I do not intend to have to ask you again to arrange the rigging on a Stokes stretcher, so that it can be lowered over the side. And I don't suppose you've made the restraining jacket, either. I don't know which one will be more important to your men. Those who don't hurt themselves will probably just go nuts, anyway."
McNulty's eyes were flat and cold and hard. "I will do all of it in my own damn good time," he said. He turned his head almost imperceptibly, and spat with unerring aim and force over the rail.
Although it was some little time before he knew it, Williams, sponsored by McNulty, was now acknowledged to be the new confederate of all-right men aboard the Ajax. There was someone in the sick bay whom they felt they understood, after all, fundamentally alien though he was to them. When the chips were down they would expect to be able to count on Williams.
In the Navy, it is up to the key men of the enlisted ranks to protect the interests of the crew. It was fairly easy to jettison enlisted men of lower ratings who did not fit into the scheme of things, or who threatened the harmony of a ship's operation. The leading petty officers; Sullivan, the yeoman; McNulty; even Williams, if he cooperated, could break a man if they wanted to. By shifting him from department to department, by assigning him the most unpleasant duties, by pretending, in his presence, that he did not exist, they could make him wish he had never been born. In the end, they would force him to put in a request for a transfer. Sullivan usually had these requests typed and waiting.
But with a chief it was different. You were supposed to be able to rely on his cooperation and instinctive understanding. If it was made known to a chief that he was unpopular or disliked, the unwritten code said that he must find some excuse to request a transfer. Obviously, Bullitt was not going to do this. He could not help knowing that he was disliked, but either he was the sort of man who enjoyed the goad of unpopularity or he had reasons of his own for wishing to stay where he was. In any event, steps had to be taken.
In their defense, it must be said that it was for more than the reason of simple dislike that men like McNulty wished to be rid of him. With the Ajax completing at Argentia the first phase of its practice maneuvers, the air was filled with rumors. They were to go to the Mediterranean. They were to join the Atlantic Patrol. They were to go south, through the Panama Canal, to the Pacific.
From the time of its commissioning at Norfolk, through its stay at Argentia, the Ajax had been gradually fitted with the very newest developments in radar and sonar, the latest in projectile equipment for K-guns. Also, the Ajax had been constructed to sustain a high speed for very long periods.
The effect of all this was to instill in every man the conviction that they were a marked lot, destined for some important mission. Since the Bureau of Personnel would scarcely exercise less care in the selection of the crew than the Bureau of Ships had demonstrated in the construction of the Ajax, certainly some effort must have been made to see that they were a hand-picked lot. The Bureau would want all of them to work together, and to get along well together, and if some mistake had been made in assignment, obviously the Bureau would be grateful to them for attempting to rectify it. By this specious reasoning they arrived at the inescapable conclusion that, for the sake of the Ajax, Chief Bullitt must go.
It was shortly after the drunken episode that Doctor Claremont came to the sick bay one afternoon, when Williams was alone. "You spend more time with Chief Bullitt than I do, Williams," the doctor said, clasping and unclasping his thin hands. "Does he seem —well, strange, or unbalanced to you?"
Williams looked up from his task of folding gauze squares with surprise. "I suppose I never thought about it, sir. Why?"
Doctor Claremont paced the few feet of the sick bay, back and forth. "Sullivan came to me in my cabin," he said. "He told me that the chiefs had sent him. They say his behavior is —well, odd. I gather they feel he should be sent ashore for study when we get back to a port in the States."
Williams' immediate reaction was one of resistance. This was the old, familiar device. If you couldn't get rid of a man any other way, you could always claim that he was psycho. Williams returned Doctor Claremont's questioning glance without speaking. It was not necessary for him to speak. They had both served in Navy hospitals. They knew what could happen to a man who was sent there with a Diagnosis undetermined. Neuropsychiatric.
"They say he drinks in his quarters, too," Doctor Claremont said, reflectively. "I suppose that might account for something."
"I wouldn't know about that, sir," Williams said, going on with his work. It was true that Bullitt did not allow him to use medical alcohol in the sick bay for any purpose for which something else, such as iodine, might be substituted. Williams had been instructed in his hospital training to clean the skin, before a routine injection, with a bit of cotton saturated in alcohol; but iodine or Merthiolate was used aboard the Ajax, while the supply of medical alcohol steadily and mysteriously diminished. But Williams did not allow himself to have any opinion about this at all. To begin with, it seemed to him far less harmful to drink medical alcohol than shaving lotion, as some of the men did, or the propellent fuel of the torpedoes, after straining it through a loaf of bread, under the impression that this rendered it fit for human consumption. Also, as was repeatedly pointed out to him. Chief Bullitt was a Regular Navy man, and, while a cat may look at a queen, it is better that a member of the Naval Reserve see nothing in the presence of a member of the USN, And besides —Williams looked around him at the tidy sick bay, at the results of all the careful, steady effort that had filled their time. Even now Bullitt was not lolling about the chiefs' quarters, drinking coffee or reading a comic book, as some of the others did in the afternoons. No, he was down below in the hold, unpacking and checking medical equipment.
"He does ride me, Doctor," Williams said at length. "He is difficult. But I'm not prepared to say that he is psychotic."
Doctor Claremont sighed, and dropped his hands, "I suppose we can just ignore the whole thing," he said, turning to leave the sick bay. "It will probably all blow over."
It was not until practice maneuvers were completed and the AJax was under way again, on the first day out, that McNulty came to Williams. Apparently, since Sullivan had heard nothing from Doctor Claremont, the conspirators had decided to take a new tack. McNultv came to Williams with a confidential air, and an easy camaraderie that was shattered by his astonishment at meeting with resistance. "But Doc!" he said. "I've seen how he treats you! You can't tell me you wouldn't like to get rid of him. All you have to do," he said, lowering his voice to a tone of earnest persuasion, his eyes fixed on Williams, "is to say that you think he's just a little off, a little Asiatic. You know, just something to get him off the ship long enough so that we can go off without him."
"But not that way," Williams said stubbornly. His job that afternoon was to fill gelatin capsules with a compound of acetylsalicylic. He wore a laboratory apron to do this, and, with the compound and the capsules spread out before him, he felt like a travesty of a housewife making tea cakes. "I don't see why they have to crucify Bullitt just because they happen not to like him," he said, doggedly going about his work.