Starr lifted his head again, looked coldly across at Vallery.

"Why, incidentally, the signal to the Admiral? Surely your own marines-----"

"My orders," Tyndall interrupted bluntly. "Turn our own marines against men they've sailed with for two and half years? Out of the question! There's no matelot-boot-neck antipathy on this ship, Admiral Starr: they've been through far too much together... Anyway," he added dryly, "it's wholly possible that the marines would have refused. And don't forget that if we had used our own men, and they had quelled this-ah-mutiny, the Ulysses would have been finished as a fighting ship."

Starr looked at him steadily, dropped his eyes to the signal again.

"'1830, Marine boarding party from Cumberland: no resistance offered to boarding: attempted to arrest, six, eight suspected ringleaders: strong resistance by stokers and seamen, heavy fighting poop-deck, stokers' mess-deck and engineers' flat till 1900: no firearms used, but 2 dead, 6 seriously injured, 35-40 minor casualties.'" Starr finished reading, crumpled the paper in an almost savage gesture. "You know, gentlemen, I believe you have a point after all." The voice was heavy with irony. "'Mutiny' is hardly the term. Fifty dead and injured: 'pitched battle' would be much nearer the mark."

The words, the tone, the lashing bite of the voice provoked no reaction whatsoever. The four men still sat motionless, expressionless, unheeding in a vast indifference.

Admiral Starr's face hardened.

"I'm afraid you have things just a little out of focus, gentlemen. You've been up here a long time and isolation distorts perspective. Must I remind senior officers that, in wartime, individual feelings, trials and sufferings are of no moment at all? The Navy, the country, they come first, last and all the time." He pounded the table softly, the gesture insistent in its restrained urgency. "Good God, gentlemen," he ground out, "the future of the world is at stake, and you, with your selfish, your inexcusable absorption in your own petty affairs, have the colossal effrontery to endanger it!"