Whistle by James Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

white, silent breakers against the far-off coast. The staring Landers knew that neither ship nor shore was inhabited, just as he knew the ship would never reach its coastal destination. The coast would gently recede, cunningly adjusting its movement to the ship’s own speed, so that the distance between the two would remain the same forever in the bright warm cheerful sun—a sun that, strangely, did not move in the heavens and at the same time cast no shadows.
    That the empty ship would never reach the empty continent did not matter. Indeed, Landers knew from somewhere that it was the ship’s express purpose not to reach that shore. The ship itself was not even a ship any more but something else, And the unpeopled mysterious blue continent was—what? Landers did not know. But it was the most beautiful and serene and peaceful, and right, sight he had ever seen, and looking at it filled him with the greatest composure and sense of pleasure he had ever known.
    Down below somewhere, he knew, another man called Marion Landers stood gazing with eyes widened in a trance. Landers knew that if that other man blinked the vision, dream, revelation, whatever it was, would disappear. But this could not scratch or dent his pleasure. That was part of it, too.
    And far off, the white breakers clashed gently on the unpeopled sands of that long blue coast, where forests of great green-leafed trees and green supple grasses remained the only living things. That continent which, uninhabited, enigmatic, unfathomable and vast, loomed beckoning. And upon which no ship would ever make its landing.
    Landers did not blink. He refused to. He would not let himself. But it didn’t matter. Slowly he felt himself coming back into himself, anyway. He felt a part of him pouring back in slowly in a thick solid untrickling stream like liquid chocolate poured from a bowl. Then he did blink.
    What was happening to him? A jerky panic ran all through him like a jolt of electricity. Slowly he turned away, and limped off to look for Winch. Somebody, anybody, to talk to.
    But before he reached the top of the flight of ship’s stairs to Promenade Deck, he had changed his mind. Winch was Landers’ hero. And had been, since Landers was first assigned to the old Regular Army outfit, and because of his clerical knowledge been dragooned to work for Winch as clerk. But Winch would be no help to him in the things Landers was wrestling with now. And maybe no help to him ever. That was another new revelation.
    So at the top of the stairs, he veered off and headed for the main lounge. Where Bobby Prell would certainly still be. Prell, all trussed up in traction like a chicken going to market, was not about to go on deck.
    As he approached the door, Landers began preparing himself for the soft sick smell that would engulf him. The only thing to do was to breathe it in, and not try to avoid it. As he opened the door, it hit him in the face with a warm, wet, slippery splash like glissading sewer water.
    Then, as he stood still inside the door a moment, to get used to it, he saw the old company’s former mess/sgt Johnny Stranger was leaning over the end of Prell’s bunk halfway down the big room, laughing and talking.
    After standing indecisively a moment, Landers opened the door and went back outside. He did not want to talk to Strange. He had not really wanted to talk to Prell. Rather hopelessly, but cautiously, he started back down the steep ship’s stairs on his crutches.
    Going down the steep, slippery iron stairs was even more dangerous than climbing them, to a man on crutches.

CHAPTER 4
    T HEY DOCKED LATE THAT NIGHT, in San Diego. No one felt like sleeping, but it would have been impossible anyway. Dago was where the Navy and Marine Corps wounded were being taken off.
    The little ship, dwarfed now by the Navy fighting ships nearby, blazed with lights. Shore-based stretcher-bearers and the whiteclad shipboard medics moved down the aisles and passageways, calling to