want glory, but all the London Gazettes and Buckingham Palaces in the world can't give him the kind of glory he wants: Captain Vallery is no longer a child, and only children play with toys... As for immortality.' He laughed, without a trace of rancour now, laid a hand on Nicholls's shoulder. 'I ask you, Johnny-wouldn't it be damned stupid to ask for what he has already?'
Nicholls said nothing. The silence lengthened and deepened, the rush of the air from the ventilation louvre became oppressively loud. Finally, Brooks coughed, looked meaningfully at the 'Lysol' bottle.
Nicholls filled the glasses, brought them back. Brooks caught his eyes, held them, and was filled with sudden pity. What was that classical understatement of Cunningham's during the German invasion of Crete,' It is inadvisable to drive men beyond a certain point.' Trite but true.
True even for men like Nicholls. Brooks wondered what particular private kind of hell that boy had gone through that morning, digging out the shattered, torn bodies of What had once been men. And, as the doctor in charge, he would have had to examine them all-or all the pieces he could find...
'Next step up and I'll be in the gutter.' Nicholls's voice was very low. 'I don't know what to say, sir. I don't know what made me say it.... I'm sorry.'
'Me too,' Brooks said sincerely. 'Shooting off my mouth like that! And I mean it.' He lifted his glass, inspected the contents lovingly. 'To our enemies, Johnny: their downfall and confusion, and don't forget Admiral Starr.' He drained the glass at a gulp, set it down, looked at Nicholls for a long moment.
'I think you should hear the rest, too, Johnny. You know, why Vallery doesn't turn back.' He smiled wryly. 'It's not because there are as many of these damned U-boats behind us as there are in front-which there undoubtedly are.' He lit a fresh cigarette, went on quietly:
'The Captain radioed London this morning. Gave it as his considered opinion that FR77 would be a goner-' annihilated' was the word he used and, as a word, they don't come any stronger-long before it reached the North Cape. He asked at least to be allowed to go north about, instead of east for the Cape... Pity there was no sunset tonight, Johnny,' he added half-humourously. 'I would have liked to see it.'
'Yes, yes,' Nicholls was impatient. 'And the answer?'
'Eh! Oh, the answer. Vallery expected it immediately.' Brooks shrugged.
'It took four hours to come through.' He smiled, but there was no laughter in the eyes. 'There's something big, something on a huge scale brewing up somewhere. It can only be some major invasion-this under your hat, Johnny?'
'Of course, sir!'
'What it is I haven't a clue. Maybe even the long-awaited Second Front.
Anyway, the support of the Home Fleet seems to be regarded as vital to success. But the Home Fleet is tied up, by the Tirpitz, And so the orders have gone out, get the Tirpitz. Get it at all costs.' Brooks smiled, and his face was very cold. 'We're big fish, Johnny, we're important people. We're the biggest, juiciest bait ever offered up the biggest, juiciest prize in the world today-although I'm afraid the trap's a trifle rusty at the hinges... The signal came from the First Sea Lord-and Starr. The decision was taken at Cabinet level. We go on. We go east.'
'We are the 'all costs,'' said Nicholls flatly. 'We are expendable.'
'We are expendable,' Brooks agreed. The speaker above his head clicked on, and he groaned. 'Hell's bells, here we go again!'
He waited until the clamour of the Dusk Action Stations' bugle had died away, stretched out a hand as Nicholls hurried for the door.
'Not you, Johnny. Not yet. I told you, the skipper wants you. On the bridge, ten minutes after Stations begin.'
'What? On the bridge? What the hell for?'
'Your language is unbecoming to a junior officer,' said j Brooks solemnly. 'How did the men strike you today?' he went on inconsequently. 'You were working with them all morning. Their usual selves?'
Nicholls blinked, then recovered.
'I suppose so.' He hesitated. 'Funny, they seemed a lot better a couple of days ago, but-well, now they're back to the Scapa stage.
Walking zombies. Only more so-they can hardly walk now.' He shook his head. 'Five, six men to a stretcher. Kept tripping and falling over things. Asleep on their feet-eyes not focusing, too damned tired to look where they're going.'
Brooks nodded. 'I know, Johnny, I know. I've seen it myself.'
'Nothing mutinous, nothing sullen about them any more.'
Nicholls was puzzled, seeking tiredly to reduce nebulous, scattered impressions to a homogeneous coherence. 'They've neither the energy nor the initiative left for a mutiny now, anyway, I suppose, but it's not that. Kept muttering to themselves in the F.D.R.: 'Lucky bastard.' 'He died easy', things like that. Or 'Old Giles-off his bleedin' rocker.'
And you can imagine the shake of the head. But no humour, none, not even the grisly variety you usually...' He shook his own head. 'I just don't know, sir. Apathetic, indifferent, hopeless, call 'em what you like. I'd call 'em lost.'
Brooks looked at him a long moment, then added gently:
'Would you now?' He mused. 'And do you know, Johnny, I think you'd be right... Anyway,' he continued briskly, 'get up there. Captain's going to make a tour of the ship.'
'What!' Nicholls was astounded. 'During action stations? Leave the bridge?'
'Just that.'
'But, but he can't, sir. It's, it's unprecedented!'
'So's Captain Vallery. That's what I've been trying to tell you all evening.'
'But he'll kill himself!' Nicholls protested wildly.
'That's what I said,' Brooks agreed wryly. 'Clinically, he's dying. He should be dead. What keeps him going God only knows-literally. It certainly isn't plasma or drugs... Once in a while, Johnny, it's salutary for us to appreciate the limits of medicine. Anyway, I talked him into taking you with him... Better not keep him waiting.'
For Lieutenant Nicholls, the next two hours were borrowed from purgatory. Two hours, the Captain took to his inspection, two hours of constant walking, of climbing over storm-sills and tangled wreckage of steel, of squeezing and twisting through impossibly narrow apertures, of climbing and descending a hundred ladders, two hours of exhausting torture in the bitter, heart-sapping cold of a sub-zero temperature. But it was a memory that was to stay with him always, that was never to return without filling him with warmth, with a strange and wonderful gratitude.
They started on the poop-Vallery, Nicholls and Chief Petty Officer Hartley-Vallery would have none of Hastings, the Master-At-Arms, who usually accompanied the Captain on his rounds. There was something oddly reassuring about the big, competent Chief. He worked like a Trojan that night, opening and shutting dozens of watertight doors, lifting and lowering countless heavy hatches, knocking off and securing the thousand clips that held these doors and hatches in place, and before ten minutes had passed, lending a protesting Vallery the support of his powerful arm.
They climbed down the long, vertical ladder to 'Y' magazine, a dim and gloomy dungeon thinly lit with pinpoints of garish light. Here were the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers-the non-specialists in the purely offensive branches. 'Hostilities only' ratings, almost to a man, in charge of a trained gunner, they had a cold, dirty and unglamorous job, strangely neglected and forgotten, strangely, because so terribly dangerous. The four-inch armour encasing them offered about as much protection as a sheet of newspaper to an eight-inch armour-piercing shell or a torpedo...
The magazine walls-walls of shells and cartridge cases, were soaking wet, dripping constantly visibly, with icy condensation. Half the crew were leaning or lying against the racks, blue, pinched, shivering with cold, their breath hanging heavily in the chill air: the others were trudging heavily round and round the hoist, feet splashing in pools of water, lurching, stumbling with sheer exhaustion, gloved hands buried in their pockets, drawn, exhausted faces sunk on their chests. Zombies, Nicholls thought wonderingly, just living zombies. Why don't they lie down?
Gradually, everyone became aware of Vallery's presence, stopped walking or struggling painfully erect, eyes too tired, minds too spent for either wonder or surprise.
