Mitch moistened his lips nervously. The voice was no longer Barkley's. Commsubfleet Jaybird was Admiral Harrinore. He chuckled bitterly then, realizing that he was still automatically startled by rank. He remained in the conning tower, listening.
"Sugar William Niner Zero, this is Commsubfleet Jaybird. If you will obey orders immediately, I guarantee that you will be allowed to accept summary discipline. No court martial if you comply. You are to return to base at once. Otherwise, we shall be forced to blast you out of the ocean as a deserter to the enemy. Over."
So that was it, he thought. They were worried about the sub falling into Soviet paws. Some of its equipment was still classified "secret", although the Reds probably already had it.
No, he wasn't deserting to the enemy. Neither side was right in the struggle, although he preferred the West's brand of wrongness to the bloodier wrongness of the Reds. But a man in choosing the lesser of two evils must first decide whether the choice really has to be made, and if there is not a third and more desirable way. Before picking a weapon for self-destruction, it might help to reason whether or not suicide is really necessary.
He smiled sardonically into the gray gloom, knowing that his thinking was running backwards, that he had acted before reasoning why, that he was rationalizing in an attempt to soothe himself and absolve himself. But a lot of human thinking occurred beneath the level of consciousness, down in the darker regions of the mind where it was not allowed to become conscious lest it bring shame to the thinker. And perhaps he had reasoned it all out in that mental half-world where thoughts are inner ghosts, haunting the possessed man with vague stirrings of uneasiness, leading him into inexplicable behaviour.
I am free now, he told himself. I have given them my declaration of independence, and I am an animal struggling to survive. Living in society, a man must submit to its will, but now I am divorced from it, and I shall live apart from it if I live at all, and I shall owe it nothing. The "governed" no longer gives his consent. How many times have men said, "If you don't like the system here, why don't you get out?" Well, he was getting out, and as a freeborn human animal, born as a savage into the world, he had that right, if he had any rights at all.
He grunted moodily and lowered himself down into the belly of the sub. They would be starting the search soon. He sealed the hatches and opened the water intakes after slowing to a crawl. The sub shivered and settled. The indicator crept to ten feet, twenty, thirty. At fifty feet, he jabbed a button on the computer, and the engines growled a harder thrust. He kept the northeasterly heading at maximum underwater speed.
An hour crept by. He listened for code on the sonar equipment, but heard only the weird and nameless sea-sounds. He allowed himself a reading light in the cramped compartment, folded the map-table up from the wall, and studied the coastline of Africa.
He began to feel a frightening loneliness, although scarcely two hours had passed since his rebellious decision, and he was accustomed to long weeks alone at sea. He scoffed at himself. He would get along okay; the sub would take him any place he wanted to go, if he could escape pursuit. Surely there must be some part of the world where men were not concerned with the senseless struggle of the titans. But all such places were primitive, savage, almost unendurable to a man born and tuned to the violin-string pitch of technological culture.