The captain raved when Sedgemoor touched his legs and tried to straighten them. His jaws clamped. Sweat dripped from his face.
The engineer calmed him for a time, but through the rest of the night the captain’s demon continued its ravings. Sparkie called the medical service, which radioed back regrets that they had an epileptic on their hands, and sent instructions on how to treat him. Two days later they steamed into Seattle, and the captain was taken ashore, his game neatly parcelled and labelled by Tom, never to be seen by any of them again.
For years he could not pass a toy shop without wondering whether old Captain Robinson had recovered sufficiently to market his weird hobby. He would look among rows of coloured boxed in the hope of seeing that he had. Perhaps the concentration of devising such a complicated and never-ending game had in fact held back the seizure for many years, yet only till such time as would make certain that the first fit would be his last as far as duty at sea was concerned.
Sedgemoor spent weeks blocking in the colours of his ‘Mona Lisa’. He one day looked at his masterpiece (‘A bit too lovingly,’ said the cook), finished but for a few last numbers around the enigmatic yet for him utterly discouraging smile, and deciding he could do no more towards bringing it to life beyond the state of a mere painting, masterpiece though it might be, walked on deck with it, stood on the rail, and fell overboard.
A Filipino deck-swabber saw him go, so that he was soon hauled back. The artist-by-numbers explained to the captain, who had nothing less than murder in his eyes, that he had been taking his painting into the air to dry when a gust of wind caught the large canvas and, acting like a sail, carried him away.
8
The map of the world made from match heads by the third mate was, when complete, the marvel of the ship. Even the captain asked to see it. No one thought to remark on so inflammable a work being kept in one of the cabins. Some must have known that the match heads were lethal, but did not realize the possibility of fire should it rest too long against hot pipes.
Nothing of the sort happened, however. After finishing his object the third mate often placed it on a table, closed his eyes, and ran his fingers along coastlines till he knew it so well that he could tell exactly where he was, as if he were a blind person reading a Braille map of the world. The only man who had not seen it was the cook, and for him the third mate brought out his huge board and set it on the ping-pong table in the crew’s rest room. Those who thought they might not get another opportunity of seeing the map also came in.
Puffing a half-smoked cheroot, the cook leaned over to look. Such utter fascination must have its consequences. Hot ash from his foul-smelling smokeroo landed at the top of Norway and, being neglected while he looked at Australia, one match head ignited with a sprout of blue and yellow flame, generating sufficient heat to make contact with those on either side. A handkerchief, or perhaps an upturned ashtray, could easily have doused this initial conflagration, but no one seemed able to do anything except stare.
A line of blue flame went east along the Siberian coast, and another zig-zagged in a southerly direction down Norway and leapt across to Denmark. The cook was mesmerized, so much so that the cheroot also fell, bounced, and hit the top of Scotland, thus encircling Great Britain by fire, and also Ireland when heat seeped to Ulster via the Mull of Kintyre.
Those who looked were either helpless, or they enjoyed the sight of a disaster for which they had no responsibility. Eurasia went up in smoke, and flame traversed the Bering Straits to surround the Americas. From Asia it travelled via the Malay Peninsula to Indonesia, not even sparing Australia. The board was thick enough not to let the universal flare-up damage the table, and no one troubled to save the world. Not even Madagascar was unscorched, because after the white heat had ignited Africa through the Sinai Peninsula, and fizzed its all-destroying track down the Red Sea (joined by fire coming from a flame that had already entered the Dark Continent, soon to be dark no more, by the Straits of Gibraltar), it jumped sufficiently eastwards to reach that island also. Only a few spots in the Pacific and parts of the south Polar regions were seen to be untouched when the smoke became diagonal rather than vertical, and to these the third mate, after much hand-wringing, gibbering laughter, and a kind of tap-dancing rage, took out his lighter and also put a match.
The smouldering board was thrown over the side, trailing a few rags of smoke, a sound of conflict as it fought and then made peace with the water. Tom lent the third mate a pair of field-glasses so that he could view his devastated creation floating like a mouldy biscuit in the green sea.
No man’s pastime could have ended more satisfactorily. The man had come to the end of hobbying even before the accident, which was why he did not try to stop the powder-train of destruction. He could have saved Africa at least, perhaps half of Asia, conceivably Japan, but the fire combusted from the smouldering in his soul, and he played the malevolent god by letting continent after continent burn. The hobbyman has his own pressurized space within which the obsession plies itself, but sooner or later baleful normality breaks in from the world of so-called sanity, reminding him that even on a ship no man lives alone, and that all were subject to laws which, while not easily comprehended, bound them in ways from which it was impossible to escape.
Tom had noted the dogged preoccupations of the hobbyists which prevented self-knowledge from overwhelming them, or which denied the fact that their prior desolation had been an act of God. They were happy, and good luck to them, but he, apart from the distraction of a few books and records, preferred to let the ocean of twilight and nightly solitude break over him and do its worst. Between watches when he couldn’t sleep, read, listen to music or even talk to himself, he would sit in his darkened cabin with eyes wide open, lulled by the sound of bashing sea and consuming engines, to recall details of his life with as much clarity as imagination could muster, warding off despair with a determination that turned aside any notions of self-pity. Not knowing where he came from, he had no ghosts to push aside. Having no places to go to, there were few hopes on which he could with any realism dwell. Hopes that might be close were under the water through which the ship was pushing its way, and no moment passed when he was not aware that he would only find solutions if he sank endlessly down to look for them.
The energy to do much was present, but to seek any other posture except that of sitting upright on the only chair, would be to pull himself towards the water by a force impossible to hold back from. At the worst, the only way to survive was to stiffen against inner temptations which were stronger and more dangerous than those outside. His spirit, composed of the will to fight against emptiness, was opposed by the cultivation of an even greater emptiness, so that he could look on the original with less fear. From such a vantage point, he was safe – yet one shade nearer to the deadness which is called annihilation.
He descended, yet stayed alert, and hours had vanished into minutes when the steward knocked at his door and came in with tea, which he would drink quickly no matter how hot, then walk on to the bridge, thankful that duty intervened as a form of salvation from attacks against which his life seemed the only defence.