McBee was horrified. "You could have lost your net!" "My weatherman absolutely ruled out any sudden squalls." "Weatherman. You could have lost your net!" Salter studied him. "Saying that once was thoughtless, McBee. Saying it twice is insulting. Do you think I'd gamble with twenty thousand lives?"
McBee passed his hands over his tired face. “I'm sorry” he said. "I told you I was exhausted. Of course under special circumstances, it can be a safe maneuver." He walked to a porthole for a glance at his own ship, the nineteenth in the long echelon behind Grerwille. Salter stared after him, "Losing one's net," was a phrase that occurred in several proverbs; it stood for abysmal folly. In actuality a ship that lost its phosphor-bronze wire mesh was doomed, and quickly. One could improvise with sails or try to jury-rig a net out of the remaining rigging, but not well enough to feed twenty thousand hands, and no fewer than that were needed, for maintenance. Grenville's Convoy had met a derelict which lost its net back before 240; children still told horror stories about it, how the remnants of port and starboard watches, mad to a man, were at war, a war of vicious night forays with knives and clubs.
Salter went to the bar and accepted from the Commodore's steward his first drink of the evening, a steel tumbler of colorless fluid distilled from a fermented mash of sargassum weed. It was about forty percent alcohol and tasted pleasantly of iodides.
He looked up from his sip and his eyes widened. There was a man in captain's uniform talking with the Commodore and he did not recognize his face. But there had been no promotions lately!
The Commodore saw him looking and beckoned him over. He saluted and then accepted the old man's handclasp, "Captain Slater," the Commodore said, "my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester; Salter, this is Captain Degerand of the White Fleet."
Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville's Convoy was far from sailing alone upon the seas. On watch he had beheld distant sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the two-degree belt north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs was still another, in fact that the seaborne population of the world was a constant one billion, eighty million. But never had he expected to meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who sailed under Grenville's flag,
Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing pointed teeth. His uniform was perfectly ordinary and very queer. He understood Salter's puzzled look. "It's woven cloth," he said. 'The White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville's. By then they had machinery to reconstitute fibers suitable for spinning and they equipped us with it. It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. I think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot of skilled labor when they break down."
The Commodore had left them.
"Are we very different from you?" Salter asked.
Degerand said: "Our differences are nothing. Against the dirt men we are brothers-blood brothers."
The term "dirt men" was discomforting; the juxtaposition with "blood" more so. Apparently he was referring to whoever it was that lived on the continents and islands-a shocking breach of manners, of honor, of faith. The words of the Charter circled through Salter's head: "… return for the sea and its bounty… renounce and abjure the land from which we-" Salter had been ten years old before he knew that there were continents and islands. His dismay must have shown on his face.
"They have doomed us," the foreign captain said. "We cannot refit. They have sent us out, each upon our two degrees of ocean in larger or smaller convoys as the richness of the brit dictated, and they have cut us off. To each of us will come the catastrophic storm, and bad harvest, the lost net, and death."
It was Salter's impression that Degerand had said the same words many times before, usually to large audiences.
The Commodore's talker boomed out: "Now hear this!" His huge voice filled the stateroom easily; his usual job was to roar through a megaphone across a league of ocean, supplementing flag and lamp signals, "Now hear this!" he boomed. "There's tuna on the table-big fish for big sailors'."
A grinning steward whisked a felt from the sideboard, and there by Heaven it lay! A great baked fish as long as your leg, smoking hot and trimmed with kelp! A hungry roar greeted it; the captains made for the stack of trays and began to file past the steward, busy with knife and steel.
Salter marveled to Degerand: "I didn't dream there were any left that size. When you think of the tons of brit that old-timer must have gobbled!"
The foreigner said darkly: "We slew the whales, the sharks, the perch, the cod, the herring-everything that used the sea but us. They fed on brit and one another and concentrated it in firm savory flesh like that, but we were jealous of the energy squandered in the long food chain; we decreed that the chain would stop with the link brit-to-man."
Salter by then had filled a tray. "Brit's more reliable," he said. "A convoy can't take chances on fisherman's luck." He happily bolted a steaming mouthful.
"Safety is not everything," Degerand said. He ate, more slowly than Salter. "Your Commodore said you were a rash seaman."
"He was joking. If he believed that, he would have to remove me from command."
The Commodore walked up to them, patting his mouth with a handkerchief and beaming "Surprised, eh?" he demanded. "Glasgow's lookout spotted that big fellow yesterday half a kilometer away. He signaled me and I told him to lower and row for him. The boat crew sneaked up while he was browsing and gaffed him clean. Very virtuous of us. By killing him we economize on brit and provide a fitting celebration for my captains. Eat hearty! It may be the last we'll ever see."
Degerand rudely contradicted his senior officer. "They can't be wiped out clean, Commodore, not exterminated. The sea is deep. Its genetic potential cannot be destroyed We merely make temporary alterations of the feeding balance."
"Seen any sperm whale lately?" the Commodore asked, raising his white eyebrows. "Go get yourself another helping, captain, before it's gone." It was a dismissal; the foreigner bowed and went to the buffet.
The Commodore asked: "What do you think of him?"
"He has some extreme ideas," Salter said.
"The White Fleet appears to have gone bad," the old man said. "That fellow showed up on a cutter last week in the middle of harvest wanting my immediate, personal attention. He's on the staff of the White Fleet Commodore. I gather they're all like him. They've got slack; maybe rust has got ahead of them, maybe they're overbreeding. A ship lost its net and they didn't let it go. They cannibalized rigging from the whole fleet to make a net for it."
"But-"
"But-but-but. Of course it was the wrong thing and now they're all suffering. Now they haven't the stomach to draw lots and cut their losses." He lowered his voice. "Their idea is some sort of raid on the Western Continent, that America thing, for steel and bronze and whatever else they find not welded to the deck. It's nonsense, of course, spawned by a few silly-clever people on the staff. The crews will never go along with it. Degerand was sent to invite us in!"
Salter said nothing for a while and then: "I certainly hope we'll have nothing to do with it."
"I'm sending him back at dawn with my compliments, and a negative, and my sincere advice to his Commodore'that he drop the whole thing before his own crew hears of it and has him bowspritted." The Commodore gave him a wintry smile. "Such a reply is easy to make, of course, just after concluding an excellent harvest. It might be more difficult to signal a negative if we had a couple of ships unnetted and only enough catch in salt to feed sixty per cent of the hands. Do you think you could give the hard answer under those circumstances?"
"I think so, sir."
The Commodore walked away, his face enigmatic. Salter thought he knew what was going en. He had been given one small foretaste of top command. Perhaps he was being groomed for Commodore-not to succeed the old man, surely, but his successor.