At last reminded of Moerlein's existence, Sam sheepishly shook his head. 'Can't afford to take a break,' he said. 'Examinations are only a week away. They don't make things easy on petty officers who want to kick their way up into real officer country.'
Moerlein had been a petty officer a long time, a lot longer than Carsten. He had no desire to become anything else, and saw no reason anyone else should have such a desire, either. 'I've known a few mustangs, or more than a few, but I'll be damned if I ever knew a happy one. Real officers treat 'em like you'd treat a nigger in a fancy suit: the clothes may be right, but the guy inside 'em ain't.'
'If I don't pass this examination, it won't matter one way or the other,' Sam said pointedly. 'And besides, officers can't be any rougher on mustangs than they are on ordinary sailors.'
'Only shows how much you know,' Moerlein answered. 'Well, don't mind me, not that you was.' He went on about his business. Sam returned to his book. He came across a section on engine maintenance he didn't remember quite so well as he should have. From feeling he knew about as much as God, he fearfully sank to thinking he knew less than a retarded ordinary seaman on his first day at sea.
Mess call was something of a relief. Sam stopped worrying about keeping a warship fueled and running and started thinking about stoking his own boiler. With the Remembrance still tied up in the Boston Navy Yard, meals remained tasty and varied- none of the beans and sausage and sauerkraut that would have marked a long cruise at sea.
Somebody sitting not far from Sam said, 'I'd sooner spend my days belching and my nights farting, long as that meant I was doing something worthwhile.'
Heads bobbed up and down in agreement, all along the mess table. 'We ought to be thankful they ain't breaking us up for scrap,' another optimist said.
Somebody else added, 'God damn Upton Sinclair to hell and gone.'
That brought more nods, Carsten among them, but a sailor snapped, 'God damn you to hell and gone, Tad, you big dumb Polack.'
Socialists everywhere, Carsten thought as Tad surged to his feet. A couple of people caught him and slammed him back down. Sam nodded again, this time in approval. 'Knock it off,' he said. 'We don't want any brawls here, not now we don't. Anything that makes the Remembrance look bad is liable to get her taken out of commission and land the lot of us on the beach. Congress isn't throwing money around like they did during the war.'
'Hell, Congress isn't throwing money around like they did before the war, neither,' Tad said. 'We busted a gut building a Navy that could go out and win, and now we're flushing it right down the head.'
'Rebs ain't got a Navy worth anything any more,' said the Socialist sailor who'd called him a Polack. 'Limeys ain't, either. No such thing as the Canadian Navy these days. So who the hell we got to worry about?'
'Goddamn Japs, for one.' Three men said the same thing at the same time, differing only in the adjective with which they modified Japs.
'Kaiser Bill's High Seas Fleet, for two,' Sam added. 'Yeah, us and the Germans are pals for now, but how long is that going to last? Best way I can think of to keep the Kaiser friendly is to stay too tough to jump on.'
That produced a thoughtful silence. At last, somebody down at the far end of the mess table said, 'You know, Carsten, when I heard you was studying for officer, I figured you was crazy. Maybe you knew what you was doing after all.'
Sam looked around to see who was in earshot. Deciding the coast was clear, he answered, 'Maybe you don't have to be crazy to be an officer, but I never heard tell that it hurts.'
Amidst laughter, people started telling stories about officers they'd known. Sam pitched in with some of his own. Inside, he was smiling. A book about leadership he'd read had suggested that changing the subject was often the best way to defuse a nasty situation. Unlike some of the things he'd read, that really worked.
After supper, he went back to studying, and kept at it till lights-out. George Moerlein shook his head. 'Never reckoned you was one of those fellows with spectacles and a high forehead,' he said.
'You want to get anywhere, you got to work for it,' Sam answered, more than a little nettled. 'Anybody wants to stay in a rut, that's his business. But anybody who doesn't, that's his business, too, or it damn well ought to be.'
'All right. All right. I'll shut up,' Moerlein said. 'Swear to Jesus, though, I think you're doing this whole thing 'cause you want I should have to salute you.'
'Oh, no,' Carsten said in a hoarse whisper. 'My secret's out.' For a moment, his bunkmate believed him. Then Moerlein snorted and cursed and rolled over in his bunk and, a couple of minutes later, started to snore.
Sam ran on coffee and cigarettes and very little sleep till the day of the examinations, which were held in a hall not far from the Rope Walk, the long stone building in which the Navy's great hemp cables were made. Commander Grady slapped Sam on the back as he left the Remembrance, 'Just remember, you can do it,' the gunnery officer said.
'Thank you, sir,' Sam said, 'and, if you please, sir, just remember, this was your idea in the first place.' Grady laughed. Sam hurried past him and down the gangplank.
Sitting at a table in the examination hall waiting for the lieutenant commander at the front of the room to pass out the pile of test booklets on his desk, Sam looked around, studying the competition. He saw a roomful of petty officers not a whole lot different from himself. Only a few were younger than he; several grizzled veterans had to be well past fifty. He admired their persistence and hoped he would outscore them in spite of it.
Then he stopped worrying about anything inessential, for the officer started giving out the booklets. 'Men, you will have four hours,' he said. 'I wish you all the best of luck, and I remind you that, should you not pass, the examination will be offered again in a year's time. Ready?… Begin.'
How many times had some of those grizzled veterans walked into this hall or others like it? That thought gave Sam a different perspective on persistence. He wondered if he'd keep coming back after failing the examination half a dozen or a dozen times. Hoping he wouldn't have to find out, he opened the booklet and plunged in.
The examination was as bad as he'd feared it would be, as bad as he'd heard it would be. As he worked, he felt as if his brain were being sucked out of his head and down onto the paper by way of his pencil. He couldn't imagine a human mind containing all the knowledge the Navy Department evidently expected its officers to have at their fingertips. Panic threatened to overwhelm him when he came upon the first question he couldn't even begin to answer.
Well, maybe these other bastards can't answer it, either, he thought. That steadied him. He couldn't do anything more than his best.
Sweat soaked his dark uniform long before the examination ended. It had nothing to do with the hall, which was very little warmer than the Boston December outside. But he noticed he was far from the only man wiping his brow.
After what seemed like forever-and, at the same time, like only a few minutes-the lieutenant commander rapped out, 'Pencils down! Pass booklets to the left.' Sam had been in the middle of a word. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered any more. He joined the weary, shambling throng of sailors filing out of the hall.
'There's always next year,' someone said in doleful tones. Carsten didn't argue with him. Nobody argued with him. Sam couldn't imagine anyone being confident he'd passed that brutal examination. He also couldn't imagine anyone showing confidence without getting lynched.
He didn't have any leave coming, so he couldn't even get drunk after the miserable thing was over. He had to return to the Remembrance and return to duty. When Commander Grady asked him how he'd done, he rolled his eyes. Grady laughed. Sam didn't see one thing funny about it.
Day followed day; 1923 gave way to 1924. Coming up on ten years since the war started, Sam thought. That seemed unbelievable, but he knew it was true. He wished ten years had gone by since the examination. When results were slow in coming, he did his best to forget he'd ever taken the miserable thing. There's always next year, he thought-except, by now, this was next year.
Then, one day, the yeoman in charge of mail called out 'Carsten!' and thrust an envelope at him. He took it with some surprise; he seldom got mail. But, sure enough, the envelope had his name typed on it, and DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY in the upper left-hand corner. He stuck his thumb over that return address, not wanting his buddies to know he'd got news he expected to be bad.
He marched off down a corridor and opened the envelope where no one could watch him do it. The letter
