Chapter 3
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, EACH SHIPLOAD had felt moved and disturbed and somehow stricken by the home continent landfall. And the voyage of Winch and Strange and the rest was not much different from the voyage the others made.
Hardly a handful of them actually believed it would really be there, really appear. But exactly on schedule it came up over the horizon. The long blue landfall appeared in the east, exactly as they had been told it would.
On the empty vastness of the slowly pulsing ocean the single steamer trailing its black plume was the only visible sign of life. The white ship with its big red crosses moved slowly along through the flat sea, which heaved and breathed beneath it like a separate existence. The ship plowed on. The sea continued to sparkle and show just the slightest froth of white now and then in the breeze and bright sun.
On the eastern horizon the long blue cloud, only slightly darker than the sky, appeared and disappeared like a mirage at first. Home. The word sped whispering through the ship like a prickle over the skin. The ship steamed slowly on and imperceptibly the blue cloud fixed itself above the waterline until it could be stared at without disappearing. Most of the cases on board had been serving overseas for at least a year. Home. The way they said it to each other, it was more a word of anxiety and deep unexorcised fear, of despair even, than of relief, love or anticipation. What would it be like, now? What would they themselves be like?
It was the same with everything. The bulletin boards and news-sheets had told them they were going home. But after so long a time away, they no longer trusted bulletins and communiqués. Bulletins and communiqués in general were more concerned with morale and with their beliefs than with realities. They all knew their beliefs were okay. God forbid anyone’s beliefs among them should be bad. But it was difficult to know if a bulletin or report had been created to affect morale, or to pass on specific information about the long blue cloud.
They could not see it from everywhere. It was visible only from the forward part of the upper decks. Of these, the only one not off-limits to them was the deck once called the Promenade Deck. Here as many of them as were able, wanted to, and could squeeze themselves into the available space, came to have a look at it.
They were a sorry-looking bunch. In the gray pajamas and maroon bathrobes, wearing the heelless duck slippers that would never stay on their feet, they pushed out through the doors onto the open forward deck and squeezed against the rail, or against those already squeezed against the rail. Shaky, skinny, stringy, yellow of eyeball and of skin, bandaged and suppurating or wearing plaster, they crippled their way up from below, some tottering, some helping each other along, a number limping along on leg casts. They were the lucky ones out of all the casualties. They had been judged sufficiently damaged to send all the way back home.
A few cried. Some laughed and clapped their hands, or slapped each other on the back. All gazed around them and at each other with anxiety. Anxiety at being so immensely lucky. A screened, secreted terror in their eyes suggested that they felt they had no right to be here.
Down below them, out on the more roomy space of what in normal times was the ship’s crew’s working deck, was crowded a mob of blueclad sailors, and whiteclad medical personnel. All of them were hired, paid, ranked, and organized, solely to service this steadily accumulating jetsam of a modern war. And the jetsam on their one small deck, indecent as a herd of turkeys, gobbled and craned and jostled and elbowed to get their look at the homeland they were all so vividly and happily aware none of them had yet died for.
Deep down in the ship in one of the cabins Marion Landers had tried to stay in his berth and found he couldn’t. Finally he rolled out and got laboriously to his feet in the small place. This was no easy operation since his right leg was in a cast to the knee. But it was impossible not to get caught up and carried along in the excited hubbub.
As a company clerk Landers was only a buck sergeant. He did not rate any airy stateroom with a porthole, like Winch and Strange. He had grown used to living mostly below decks in the half-gloom of bare electric bulbs. He felt under his pillow for his cheap sunglasses.
Involuntarily, he groaned a little. The pain was not due to his wound so much. That had stopped hurting. This was due to the stiffness caused by trying to live with the heavy plaster cast. It was impossible to sit, stand or lie comfortably in it.
On the other side of the tiny, six-man cabin there was a rustle. The kid Air Force tailgunner, who had been crying again, this time over the landfall, raised his head. “Are you going to leave me, too?”
“I guess I’ll go up. Have a look, yeah,” Landers said. He tried not to sound irritated. He got his crutches from the clothes hook. “Please, don’t leave me.”
Landers paused in the doorway, and turned deftly on his crutches. You did get used to the damn things, finally. He peered at the boy.
All of us were burdened with the same thing, at one point, Landers thought. In every cabin there was the one weak sister. The cabins always sifted themselves down into a pecking order, with the weak sister at the bottom. There was always a moral problem with him. Everybody had a responsibility to him. It was part of the code. None of us liked it much, but if you wanted to be one of us you had to go by the code. And the weak sister could use it against you. Had the moral right to do so. That was part of the advantage he gained by giving up, and accepting to be the weakest.
Landers and his kid gunner had not said a word in the half hour since the others had left to go up on deck. Landers had not felt like talking, himself. He had simply lain and stared at the ceiling shadows. Then the Air Force kid had started to cry again. It was partly what had driven Landers to his feet.
“Aw, come on, kid,” he said.
“You’re like all the others,” the thin voice piped from the depths of the berth. “I thought you were different. You’re the only decent one here. You know how I can’t stand to be alone.”
“I’ll call the ward boy for you. He’ll sit with you.” Landers paused. “He’s probably bored to death with all of us,” he added.
“I’m sure he is. Him and that damned prescription pad of his. Doodling and drawing cocks and pussies, all the time.”
Landers felt he had to get out of there or die. Explode, blow apart. It wasn’t only the boy. Something was eating at him terribly. Had been since the news came. Anyway, what a thing to be saddled with. It was not bad enough to be cooped up in here, six miserable bastards in a space meant for four healthy men. They had had to draw him. A skinny kid tailgunner with eyes as big as dinner plates in his emaciated face and dry gangrene in both legs.
He had been a hero, for his one brief day. In flight an improperly mounted .50 cal had bounded loose from its mounting and falling to the deck had locked itself on Fire and begun spraying the inside of the plane. Like a loose fire hose. The kid had dived forward and collared it and unlocked it, but he had taken four .50 cal slugs in his shins. By the time they got him back in the ripped-open refrigerated plane he had his dry gangrene. He had been given the DFC and the Silver Star and been put on this hospital boat home, and he was a crybaby. The smell was bad enough, a deep acrid bronzegreen odor that bit deep at the back of your throat like copper pennies in your mouth. His poor bare feet were the same verdigris color, and shriveled like a mummy’s. He complained all the time, and cried half the time, and he had been a college sophomore. Landers didn’t know why, by what incredible administrative mixup, he had been put on this boat. Especially since he was Air Force. They should have flown him home.
“I know it smells,” he said now. “But please stay with me.”
“I’ll call you the ward boy,” Landers said.
“Thanks. You selfish prick. I only hope someday you get in my shape.”
“Thanks,” Landers said. “Look. At the risk of sounding fatuous, I will say to you that we have all of us got to live alone. You’ve got to learn to live with it. I can’t help you. Nobody can.”
“I don’t want to live with it.” He began to blubber. “I want my mother.”
Landers ran his tongue over his teeth. “Look, they’re flying you to Walter Reed from San Diego. They’ve got the best men in the world there. If anybody can save your legs, they will. And they promised you your mother would be there to meet you.”
“Do you believe that? Anyway, the doctor told me yesterday there wasn’t any hope,” the boy said in a tiny voice.
This was an out and out lie, and Landers knew it. “I was here,” he said. “I didn’t hear him say that.” Usually when they changed his dressings, everybody stampeded like a herd of cattle out the narrow door. But at least once in a while Landers felt morally bound to stay and pretend he did not have an olfactory nerve.
“Well, he did.”
“No, he didn’t either, God damn it! I was here!”
“Yes, he did. You just didn’t hear him. Look. You’re the only college man in here. The only college man in this whole deck, probly.”
“I heard every word he said. Anyway, my three and a half years of college didn’t do me much good. Not for this. No good at all. I’ll send the ward boy to you,” Landers said, and swung around and fled.
He could not flee quite fast enough, on crutches. The boy’s cursing followed him. Then it changed to crying again. Landers felt anyone would agree the kid was going beyond all code rights.
He signaled the Army medic ward boy, who shrugged irritably but put down his comic book. Landers commenced laboriously to struggle up the steep, iron, ship’s stairs. Climbing them could be seriously dangerous, to a man on crutches.
He came out on the long glassed-in Main Deck. It had no open deck forward like the Promenade, and was deserted of troops now. Usually it had half a dozen poker games going on the deck, down its long perspective. Landers swung himself over to an opened glass and stuck his head out into the sea breeze.
For a while the sea air was enough. It took a little while for even a sea breeze to blow that awful smell out of the back of your throat. For a moment he wrestled with himself whether he had been cruel with the Air Force boy. Where did responsibility end? To your fellow human being?
But it was not the kid that had driven him up on deck. Something else had done that. When the news passed that home was sighted, a terrible reaction had seized him. An evil, awful depression. The worst thing was that he did not know what it represented, or what caused it. Also, it was totally unanticipated. Yesterday he would have bet all his unpaid back pay, which was considerable, that home landfall would have delighted him.
Now he stared at it, the faint, blue coast. From the ship’s side he could only see dimly a very short length of it. Then it faded swiftly into invisibility to the south. And such a violence of not caring raged through him that he wanted to yell out loud. It was such a mammoth, massive country. He was realizing that fact for the first time, with the shock of seeing clearly something known vaguely before but never defined. It was so big that how could you care? And all his life Landers had been taught that to care was important, that caring was the most important thing of all, whatever it was you were involved in.
There was certainly no place for a twenty-one-year-old Landers there, in it. Not Landers, staring at it from a hole in the huge side of this big ship. This ship that was now carrying toward it such a load of human meat. It frightened him, frightened him down to an unreadable depth. And at the same time, like some deep contrabass figure repeated over and over, was the thought that he did not deserve it, this return to safety.
Two men passed by behind him. They had come down from the Promenade Deck. One of them clumped along in leg plaster, his walking iron ringing on the metal deck. Their presence broke Landers’ concentration.
“Hey, Landers,” one of them said. “Thinking about all that homegrown p-ssy we’ll all be shafting?”
Landers only waved. He did not trust himself to speak. He saw that the second man had plaster on his arm and body, the bent arm held out rigidly and horizontal from the shoulder in the case. There seemed to be so many arm and shoulder cases like that on board. Perhaps they were just more conspicuous.
The men went on.
Over the sea the coast did not appear to be getting any nearer. Not to the naked eye. But that was an optical illusion. In the slight swell the ship hardly rolled at all on the easy sea. College man! Jesus!
Something had happened to Landers with his wounding in the New Georgia islands. But it was hard to say exactly what it was. It had been an easy enough wounding. Commonplace, even. A big-sized mortar round had landed close by him and blown him up and knocked him out. It must have happened to thousands. That part had not been bad at all. There was no pain, nothing hurt him, there was no time to be afraid. The noise-fire blossomed so swiftly to engulf him that he had hardly heard it. Then swift comforting blackness, buzzing up. If anything at all, there was only a half-beginning of a surprised thought: Why, this isn’t so bad—
He assumed, later, he meant dying. The thought seemed to include the idea that he would never come to. Then he did come to, his nose bleeding, his head heavy and unable to think. His head was bleeding and his helmet had disappeared. Contrary to all the rules of first aid, somebody was rolling him around and slapping his face. There was the usual comic moment of panic when he felt all over his crotch to make sure he had everything. Then he walked out. At the aid station the medical lieutenant had told him he had a mild concussion and said he would send him back to rest a couple of days. It was not till then, when he tried to get back on his feet, that they discovered his smashed ankle. He had walked out on it. It was during the time he was waiting to be jeeped out that the peculiar thing, the something, happened to him. They had cut off his shoe, which turned out to be full of blood, and had bandaged his ankle. Four men had placed him on a stretcher and carried him over and put him down where there were others waiting. He sat on the stretcher on the crest of the ridge and with some of the other wounded placidly, contentedly almost, watched the battle in progress below them.
At this point Landers’ job designation was Battalion Communications Sergeant. Wandering around with his company, where as company clerk he was not even supposed to be, he had been picked up four days before by the lt colonel commanding the battalion and impressed as his communications sergeant, to replace the original who had been killed. He had been up forward to deliver a message from the colonel to one of the platoon commanders when the mortar round knocked him off.
Being a replacement as well as a clerk, this was only Landers’ second time up in fighting country. The first time he had roamed around with his outfit a few days, been part of a small firefight, watched several men wounded, then been unconditionally ordered back to the regimental rear area to his job by the company commander, at Top/Sgt Winch’s instigation. The second time, he had armed himself with three three-day passes from the head of G-1 who thought his request marvelous. Charming, if not actually quixotic. Landers himself thought it bizarre, a good story to tell someday, how he had to get a pass to go toward the fighting. But under that was the nagging feeling which always gnawed at him, that he was back in the relative safety while they were up there in the smoke and fire. But after one day with them he had been caught and shanghaied by the battalion’s colonel. The truth was, he at once became the pet enlisted aide of the colonel, who had looked up his dossier and found he had a twenty-one-year-old with three and a half years of college. All of this had infuriated Winch, whose clerk he’d been. But the result was he spent most of his time intellectualizing the war with the battalion officers and doing organizational things fairly far back. And probably, if he had not been wounded, he would have been transferred to the colonel, with a raise in grade. But at least he could have said he was doing his share.
But on the ridge all that changed. At some unspecified point. Landers watched as below him in the shallow bowl men roared and shouted and hollered and yelled, ran forward carrying things, ran back carrying things (as often as not other men), fired guns, threw things, struggled and fought. Landers thought only one thought. They were all silly idiots. What did they think they were doing? They were ridiculous. He did not know then that most of them felt the same way when they were wounded.
On his ridge Landers watched with perfect equanimity as they bopped and banged and shot and exploded and stabbed each other. Good. Good for them. They deserved it. They deserved whatever happened to them. He felt completely acquiescent. But he was outside of it. But being outside went further than just being on the ridge. It extended to his special pet colonel, to his old outfit, to the whole Army, to his entire nation, to the enemy nation—to the whole human race, finally. He was not part of it.
He realized this did not particularly affect anything. They could still give him orders. They could put him in jail. And he would go to jail. He could be bayoneted and he would scream. They could even give him a medal and he would salute and say Thank you. Or they could kill him, and he would die. But that was all. Because all the rest was bullshit. Just plain bullshit.
It was not because they were insane. He had suspected that before, from the beginning. It was not that modern war itself was insane. He had known that, too. It was not even that in ten years these same men battling down there, those who survived, would be making trade agreements with each other, signing mutual business deals for mutual profit, while the dumb luckless dead ones moldered in some hole. Landers had been cynically aware of all that, long before. It was that, seeing it, it was all so foolish, so abysmally stupid and ridiculous and savage, he could not consider himself a part of it.
Suddenly, sitting there on the hillside, he began to weep.
Crying was no catharsis for it. When he stopped, he did not feel any better. Perhaps he felt worse. His tears had washed two striking, clean streaks down his dust-caked, gaunted cheeks. Around him other men were weeping, too. They displayed the same two striking, white streaks down their faces. This did not impress him.
All his life Landers had prided himself on being an outsider. Now he really was outside. It was not at all a pleasant feeling. They were a quarrelsome, violent race. Worse than baboons. A race of beasts. They came from a long line of beasts. Whatever they pretended. Straight back to Australopithecus. He did not want to be a part of them.
In the hours, then days, then weeks, that followed, the “outside” feeling never left Landers, nor did it change or loosen up or soften. At times the sense of it there in him made him frantic to get rid of it. But nothing could do that. The frenzy drove him to do some wild, extravagant things occasionally. But always it settled back into that strange acquiescence, without having touched the feeling.
In a couple of days he was flown out, first to Guadalcanal, then to the New Hebrides. In the Naval base hospital there the doctors looked into his eyes and ears, tested him here and there, and after a few days said his concussion was cured. They were ready to operate on his ankle.
The surgeon was a young man, a major, with a boyish handsome face which showed clearly that nothing bad had ever happened to him in his life. The same handsome sense of handsome invulnerability showed in the way he went about things.
“There’s no problem about the metal fragments. They can be removed easy enough. The problem is, there are two ways to repair your ankle,” the major smiled. “It comes down to my way against the Army way. The Army way is to patch you up and get you back to duty. The Army way, you’ll have a nearly adequate ankle out of it. But it won’t be perfectly repaired. It will almost certainly bother you the rest of your life, particularly as you get older. But you’ll be out of the hospital and back to your outfit in five weeks.
“If I fix it my way, the way I would fix it for a patient back home, you’ll be in a cast at least two months. There’ll be no choice but to send you back to the States. You’re the patient. The choice is up to you.”
Landers suddenly wanted to yell at him, curse him. Landers could remember back when his life had been like the major’s, when nothing bad had happened to him, either. That was back before his misshapen sense of honor got him to enlist in the infantry as a private.
“I suppose getting shipped back to the States would be the best thing,” he said, instead. “Wouldn’t it?”
The major had thought the answer a foregone conclusion, and Landers had rattled him. “Are you trying to tell me you prefer not to go back to the States?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, what are you trying to tell me, Sergeant, uh”—he looked down at the papers— “Landers?”
Landers felt wacky. His extravagances again. Suddenly he lowered his head and peered up at the youthful doctor through his eyebrows, and leered. Not even knowing his name seemed the last, ultimate joke. “Well, I think they’re going to get me,” he said, leering, “one way or the other. If you want to know the truth. That’s what I think. I haven’t got a chance.”
The young major was brought up short, for a moment. “Who’s they?”
“Them. You know,” Landers said. “Whoever. The same ones you’re trying to fight, isn’t it?”
“I see . . . Yes. Well.” The major scratched his nose. “I don’t think you understand. I’m not fighting any ‘them.’ I’m fighting a government policy. I’m doing my work the way it ought to be done, the way I was taught to do it.”
“Oh, I understand all right,” Landers said. But he really wanted, again, to shout at the major, simply fill his lungs with air and bellow it back out. How could he be so f*cking sure of himself about everything? How could he be so safe?
“Look. Tell me something. Do you want to go back up there?” the major asked.
Landers thought this over seriously. “No, sir,” he said finally. “I don’t want to go back.”
“All right.” The major slapped his hands down on his knees. He stood up. “I’ll have you prepared for tomorrow.”
“But I don’t think it’ll make any difference,” Landers said.
As if he had not heard, the major said, “After all, my job is seeing that you men are fixed up as well as possible for your later life.”
“Yes, sir,” Landers said sourly. “Thank you, sir.”
“Also, it’s a job of work I’d like to have a shot at. It’s got interesting problems.”
Landers stared at him. “Sir.”
“Of course, it’ll make a difference!” the major said suddenly. “Why wouldn’t it make a difference?” Still standing, the major put his hands on the desk and looked at Landers. “I don’t think you’re acting very rational. Well. It’s probably perfectly normal.” He sighed. “I’ll have you gotten ready for tomorrow.” But he looked hurt. As if somehow Landers had let him down. If he had been the type to get angry, he would probably have gotten angry.
Landers was certainly angry. But he was confused. And then he began to feel guilty. By the time he was rolled back to his ward, he began to worry. He worried all that night about their misunderstanding, about how he had treated the major. But in the morning when they rolled him in half-woozy from the shot and put him on the table, the surgeon smiled at him. Then they put the anesthetic to him.
Lying comfortably in the hospital bed after the operation, he slept a lot.
But they kept him full of dope for several days, and something kept coming back in his mind.
Going up with the message from the colonel he had carried a full canteen. The heat was terrible, and soaked with sweat he had conscientiously conserved his water. But after getting hit, he had drawn the canteen and allowed himself his first, luxurious drink. Nothing had ever tasted better in his life than the warm, gritty canteen water.
Standing among the prone members of the taut-faced, sick-faced advance platoon—as if being wounded once, already, made him invulnerable to being hit again—he thought of leaving the rest of the canteen with them. They were not even one of his own platoons. But they had been without water since midmorning. He had only to wait to drink until he was back at the aid station.
Wacky from the concussion and from shock and fear, half-laughing and half-blubbering, standing on the wounded ankle he was still too much in medical shock even to know he was hurt, the issue hung in the air in balance for a long moment. Then he took another drink, letting the water run out of the corners of his mouth luxuriously, and put the canteen away, back in its cover.
A number of them were looking at him, but there was no envy of his water on their faces. Perhaps there was a small envy of his wounding. Mainly there was a general look of sympathetic distaste. They wanted him to go away. He had been wounded, lucky bastard, he should leave. And quickly. They didn’t want to look at him. They didn’t want to be reminded.
Back on the hilltop he had sipped at the canteen until jeeped out, as most of the wounded around him were doing, while down below in the hot valley the waterless platoons bungled ahead.
This was the scene that kept presenting itself to Landers in the hospital bed. His mind seemed not to include the walk out, or the medical officer’s examination, or the discovery of his mangled ankle. Only the canteen part. He would wake in the night under the dope and babble about it to the night medic on duty. Because, in his dream, the men of the platoon wanted his water, looking at him silently with beseeching eyes, and he, Landers, would not give it to them. The night medic could never understand what he was trying to say and would always bring him water, which he always refused to drink. When they stopped the dope, it went away and he had not thought about it again.
Not until just now, that is, Landers thought. In his berth. On this reeking hospital meat boat, with the news that they had sighted home. He sighed suddenly.
The two emplastered men had passed on along the Main Deck promenade going forward. Landers had pulled his head back in out of the breeze.
From inside, framed by the edges of the big, square port, the piece of dim blue coast was like a living painting. It seemed some kind of terrifying panacea to Landers, capable of remedying all your problems, but at a terrifying cost that would leave you permanently crippled.
The air inside was tranquil, quiet. Just outside the wind caused by the ship’s passage still blew, and if he stuck out his arm his bathrobe sleeve would flap wildly. But Landers did not want to stick his arm out. The air of the long, deserted corridor gave a sense of security that washed against the feelings which fluttered wingless flutterings inside him.
He was just thinking of going to look up goddamned Mart Winch, just for someone to talk to, when a hallucination took him. Fixed him, the way a man is frozen by some kind of seizure.
Vision, illusion, waking daydream, dementia, whatever, Landers suddenly found himself outside the ship and moving up and away from it in the air.
He could look down and see the big red crosses on its white flank. There was no breeze now; the air was still. It was just as if a big helicopter was hook-lifting him away from the ship. Except there was no noise. Everything was silence. And he was hanging free and moving upward—until from a great height he looked down upon both the immensely diminished ship and a far distant shore.
Below him, slowly, the white ship moved soundlessly—and, curiously, with no smoke plume smudging the air—on toward its distant goal across the gently heaving blue expanse, whose swells ran on and on before the ship to crash in 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.