Long Voyage Back

Part One FIRE

The room was crowded. Many of its occupants were scurrying from place to place in organized chaos. A gigantic video screen filled the north wall, showing a map of the earth with lighted and blinking symbols indicating the deployment of weapons, forces, counterforces. A second, smaller screen high on the east wall spewed forth printed messages with an inventory of warheads, explosive power, probable targets, and predicted casualties. Along the south wall were ten desk-size computers, each with a uniformed man watching it, just as ancient priests watched moiling entrails. Along the western wall was a long table at which thirteen men were sitting, all but one of them in uniform, listening to a man at the head of the table who was speaking to them in a sullen, lugubrious tone of the intentions of the enemy, .the probability of surviving various war scenarios.

There was no joy or humor in the room. The seriousness had a disjointed, alienated quality, as of men working hard at a job they didn’t quite understand, discussing alternatives they didn’t quite believe in. The sullenness that marked many of their faces was the expression of men who were doing the job expected of them, but found themselves doing things they hadn’t expected to be doing. Their voices were sometimes high-pitched, close to cracking. The eyes of a few of them seemed wild. When one general burst out passionately in favor of one course of action, a few looked at him as if he were mad; others looked at him gloomily, nodding. When an admiral spoke for the opposite course of action, a few looked at him as if he were mad; others looked at him gloomily, shaking their heads.

The words spoken, whether coolly or in anger, sadness, or nervous panic, all had about them a scientific detachment as consistent and codified as the uniforms most of them wore. They were eminently reasonable words, and they poured out across the table with the sporadic urgency of a teletype machine rolling out its messages: nullify evasive evacuation… no more than eighty million… reduce counterstrike potential by forty-two percent… state of belligerency inherent in… dilute the economic infrastructure… diversification of missile response… the reduced military options necessitated by the higher kill ratio… the incidental effects of maximizing radiation… nullifying recuperative capacity…

Behind the ten desks the ten uniformed men stared at the ten computers. On the north wall the giant screen blinked out its kaleidoscope of pulsating lights like a pinball machine; a few uniformed men stared up at it as if waiting for it to tally the final score.

Eventually the men at the table seemed to have reached some sort of decision. A telephone was brought to one of them. With the receiver at his ear he waited patiently for the connection. The others watched, some smoking, others staring at the table. No one spoke. No one bothered to look at either of the video screens. No one smiled.

The man with the phone began speaking respectfully into the receiver, paused, listened, then spoke again. After less than two minutes he hung up. The others looked at him. Two orderlies began placing cups and saucers in front of the officers and poured out a hot, steaming liquid. He cleared his throat and uttered a simple declarative sentence indicating that the man he had spoken to had decided to adopt the course of action they had just recommended. No one spoke. No one leapt into action. No one smiled. One man sipped at the hot, steaming liquid; then another man followed suit. At the end of the table opposite the presiding officer a man began to cry. The officer opposite glared angrily; two other men looked away, tight-lipped.

The presiding officer began to speak again in a tense, gloomy voice, addressing first one man and then another down the table. One by one they rose to depart. Most hurried. No one spoke. No one smiled.

Finally there were only two of them left at the table—the presiding officer and the man who was crying. The first, sullen and gloomy, rose and left. Only one man was left.

Her three white hulls slicing quietly through the water, her giant genoa bellying out to starboard, Vagabond sailed into the bay. Neil Loken sat in the port cockpit of the large trimaran, watching the causeway of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, through which they had just passed, recede behind them. At the wheel Jim Stoor was peering ahead and shifting his weight excitedly from one foot to the other. Although his father owned Vagabond, this was the first time Jim had made landfall after a long ocean passage, and his boyish face, haloed by the rays of the early morning sun, showed it. He looked to Neil at that moment—his slender, broad-shouldered body bronzed by their five days at sea—like a seagoing Pan.

But Neil didn’t share Jim’s excitement and joy. Sailing up into the wide mouth and throat of the bay depressed him. He was an ocean sailor, and he rarely enjoyed leaving the clear, deep waters of the open sea for the mud and shallows of inshore bays and inlets.

And it didn’t help that the Chesapeake was a sort of home. He’d attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis for four years and, after serving in Vietnam for three, captained a forty-six-foot sloop based in Norfolk for several summers. Sailing down the bay out to sea had often meant adventure, freedom, escape. Sailing into it meant land, civilization, the complications of returning home.

As he looked forward to examine the set of the mainsail and genoa and to check Jim’s course toward the next buoy, he was also troubled by the quite mundane fact that Vagabond’s propeller shaft had been struck and bent by a submerged log off Cape Hatteras, which had left the big trimaran with no auxiliary power. How long it would take to sail her the next seventy-five miles up to Point Lookout to pick up Frank Stoor and his guests would depend on the wind, a notoriously unreliable friend, especially in the Chesapeake.

“Hey, look!” Jim suddenly said, pointing past Neil toward Norfolk. “Warships. Three of them.”

Turning, Neil sighted along the horizon and saw three long, gray vessels moving out of Hampton Roads, heading out the southern channel toward the bridge and the ocean. Two were destroyers, the third a ship the Navy must have designed since he’d resigned his commission. A supply ship maybe—but since when was a supply ship accompanied by two destroyers?

“I wonder where they’re going,” Jim went on, looking past Neil now through binoculars, holding the large stainless steel wheel in place by the pressure of his bare chest. Like Neil he was wearing only a pair of blue jean cutoffs.

“There are always a few ships from the Norfolk naval base either coming or going,” Neil said quietly, but even as he said this he recognized still another reason he was depressed: the slow, awkward, terrifying way the U.S. and Russia seemed to be trying to frighten each other into war. For the last three days the radio news reports had been increasingly disturbing. Wednesday an American reconnaissance plane was downed by an Iraqi missile, probably fired from a launcher manned by Russians; yesterday the U.S. had rejected the Soviets’ bilateral troop-withdrawal proposal, denouncing it as extortionate; today the U.S. government had reinforced its Marine units in Saudi Arabia. Neil had listened to these radio reports alone.

“You ever serve in ships like those?” Jim asked, lowering his binoculars and smiling, still excited about the recent landfall.

“No, I was lucky,” Neil replied, turning back toward Jim. “They put me in the smallest combat vessels the Navy had—coastal patrol boats.”

“You ever get sunk?” Jim asked next.

Neil smiled, his stern face suddenly lit up, his blue eyes crinkling. Jim’s boyish curiosity about things compensated for some otherwise annoying habits: his penchants for listening to loud rock music at every opportunity and for leaving food, towels, dishes, and clothing strewn around the boat as if they were precious jewels he was magnanimously bestowing upon the poverty-ridden ship. But Jim’s enthusiasm redeemed him in Neil’s eyes—that, and the important fact that he’d turned out to be an excellent sailor.

“No, I can’t say I did,” Neil replied, standing up and watching the distant warships. “In fact, most of the war I and some of my men were thoroughly depressed that no one ever fired at us.”

“But dad said you were wounded,” Jim said.

“Oh, yes,” Neil agreed. “Occasionally we got lucky.”

“And you sunk a lot of ships.”

“So they say,” said Neil, feeling himself getting tense about the direction the conversation was taking. He walked toward Jim and began doing chin-ups from the edge of the wheelhouse roof. He had a muscular gymnast’s body, browned by the sun like Jim’s, but thicker, more mature, that of a well-conditioned athlete in his thirties. Like Jim he held his six-foot frame with military erectness. But his face, unlike Jim’s, was weathered and lined, a light scar running into his hairline at his right temple. His blue eyes often pinned people with distracting coldness but could suddenly light up and crinkle with the warmth of his smile. His shock of thick brown hair was uncombed and stiffly awry from the salt water and wind.

“Well?” insisted Jim.

Neil lowered himself from the last chin-up and moved into the wheelhouse and stood beside the eighteen-year-old. Two empty glasses sat on the wheelhouse shelf, reminders of the whiskey they’d drunk at dawn when they’d sighted land for the first time since northern Florida. Neil picked up one and drained it.

“It was a push-button war, even for the smallest ships,” he said slowly. “We killed at long range. If we ever happened to see what havoc we had wrought, it was always a little disconcerting to find that the ‘enemy gunboat’ or ‘Cong supply ship’ looked suspiciously like a fishing boat, and the dead and dying like bony fishermen.”

Neil paused, staring through the windows of the wheelhouse, forward past Vagabond’s wide white deck and mainmast to the gray waves stretching out ahead.

“Some of them must have been… Cong,” said Jim.

“Oh, sure,” said Neil.

“Is that why you resigned your commission?”

“That and a dozen other reasons.”

He didn’t go on. He walked back out of the wheelhouse to end the conversation. He knew he’d been the wrong man for the job. When he’d graduated from Annapolis, he’d been fully prepared to stand on the quarterdeck and fight to the last man. But he wasn’t prepared to stand and blast away, not knowing whether he was killing good guys or bad guys, rarely being fired at in return, and forbidden by standing orders to pick up the wounded survivors.

Resigning his commission had been both a protest against a specific war, and an acknowledgment that for him, even if the war could be “justified,” the technological and impersonal means of fighting it could not. For years after resigning he’d been a loner, unsuited to either the unregimented chaos of civilian life or the companionship with his old Navy friends. A woman had brought him back to life, but after a year and a half, with the abrupt arbitrariness of battle, she had been killed in an auto accident. Since then he’d found a healthier solitude as professional captain of wealthy men’s yachts, reestablishing some of the order that he’d liked in military life, and finding a closeness with the sea and sky that seemed to heal.

Staring up at the set of the mainsail he noticed two trails of jet vapor inching across the sky, the thin cotton lines tinged with pink and seeming to emerge from nowhere in the west and to be disappearing into nowhere in the east. The planes themselves were invisible. When a loud sonic boom broke the stillness of the early morning, Jim turned quickly toward Neil.

“What was that?!” he exclaimed.

Neil pointed to the vapor trails in the sky.

Jim seemed momentarily frightened, but then grinned.

“I thought the destroyers had opened fire on us,” he said.

Neil watched the cotton trails disappear into the brightness to the east.

“Welcome back to civilization.”

Throughout the morning Vagabond sailed up the bay at a little over seven knots, and Neil went over the boat, making sure it would be ready for its owner’s inspection that night. Vagabond was a fast, roomy trimaran that moved through the water like a strange three-legged insect skipping from wave to wave. You entered the cabins in the side hull from the two side cockpits and went down steps to the long narrow floor area. The berths were up in the “wing” area over the water, separated from the main cabin by a plywood and veneer partition. Vagabond was steered from the enclosed wheelhouse that was a little aft of the center of the boat, between the main cabin with its galley and dinette area and Neil’s aft cabin. On either side of the wheelhouse were the open cockpits with settee seats and the sliding hatchway leading down into the side cabins. All this space meant that people could get away from each other at sea, and Neil, being a private man, found that important, almost as important as Vagabond’s ability to go fast, without heeling, in almost any kind of weather.

At noon he relinquished the helm to Jim in order to put through a call to Frank at his office in New York City. Jim turned on the transistor radio to catch the news, which was unusual, since he usually preferred to listen to music on his cassette tapes.

Neil’s aft cabin contained only twelve square feet of standing room between his double berth dead aft and the bulkhead that separated his cabin from the ship’s engine compartment. Although it was not as spacious as the cabins in the two side hulls, Neil preferred it to anyplace else aboard. The radiotelephone, a shortwave radio, and a chart table had all been installed here; his books were crammed onto two long shelves. With the large gray radio, the navigational equipment, and the sparse furnishings, it was a very masculine room, “about as pretty as the inside of a tank,” as one woman had described it.

When the marine operator put the call through to New York, Neil was glad to hear Frank’s husky voice.

“This stupid war stuff is screwing up everything,” Frank announced loudly. “I can’t get a flight to Washington; they’re booked solid. You think you could meet me today in Crisfield? I can get a flight to Salisbury, Maryland, and then rent a car.” Crisfield was a small fishing town about twenty-five miles across the bay from Point Lookout.

“Sure,” he replied. “That’s as easy as Point Lookout. What about the Foresters?”

“We’ll sail Vagabond across the bay and pick them up as soon as you get me. What time you figure you’ll make it to Crisfield?”

“If the wind holds or improves, we’ll be there by six tonight. But if it drops or we’re headed—”

“Well, do your best,” Frank said into the pause. “I know you must be beat. Vagabond’s a lot of boat for just two men, especially when one of them’s a goof-off.”

“Your son’s a good sailor,” Neil commented quickly.

“Yeah?” Frank replied, surprised by the news.

“In that blow off St. Augustine,” Neil went on, “Jim went up the mast when the mainsail jammed. He also took the helm for almost four hours and let me sleep through half my watch.”

“Neil!” Jim’s voice broke into the conversation from the deck just outside the cabin hatchway. “I’ve got to talk to dad. There’s going to be a war.”

“What are you talking about?” Neil asked, looking up at Jim.

“I just heard the news,” Jim went on. “We rejected the Russian offer. Let me speak to dad.”

“Uh, Frank, Jim wants to talk to you,” Neil said. “We’ll meet you tonight in Crisfield unless we’re becalmed. If we are, I’ll try to get a message through to Carter’s Bluewater Marina. Got it?”

“What? Sure. Good.”

Neil hopped up the cabin steps and hurried to the wheel as Jim took over the mike.

“Holy Jesus, dad,” Jim said. “We’re going to be fighting the Russians. There’s going to be a war!”

For a moment there was silence on the other end, then Frank’s voice replied slowly and huskily.

“Don’t worry about it, Jimmy,” he said. “This is just another war scare. Just like three months ago. Just like two years ago. This is international poker, and the secret is never to call, just keep raising.”

“The radio said we rejected their offer of bilateral troop withdrawals,” Jim went on. “Why!?”

“If we withdraw any troops now,” said Frank, his husky voice again coming in only after a pause, “we’d be seen as giving in. Our President may be a jerk, but he’s a macho jerk, so we can be sure that now that our troops are in Arabia, they’re going to stay, even if no one’s around to kill.”

“Dad, we ought to take the boat back south,” said Jim, gripping the mike in both hands. “When the war starts—”

“Now cut that crap,” Frank interrupted with abrupt annoyance. “This is just another game of international brinkmanship, and neither their assholes nor our assholes are stupid enough to go to war. The Russians don’t really care about Saudi Arabian nomads, and we don’t really care about Asian democracy.”

“But we care about oil!”

“Not enough to blow up the world,” said Frank. “Now give me Neil. No, don’t bother. Just hang up and get your ass up to Crisfield.” The line went dead.

Jim stood alone in the aft cabin. He was angry. He hated the way his father treated him. Since he’d been only an average student and had never held a job, his father had always made him feel he was some kind of good-for-nothing. He enjoyed rock music, playing his guitar, getting high with his friends and partying, and making it with Celia or occasionally some other girl. None of these qualified in Frank’s eyes as anything but a waste of time. On the three or four occasions he’d sailed with Frank on Vagabond there’d been a lot of older people aboard who’d helped Frank handle the boat. Jim had ended up retreating to his cabin to get stoned and listen to music. His father had inevitably come to shout at him to turn it down and to criticize him for not helping more with the sailing. It had been a downer. He didn’t even think he liked sailing much until this trip up from Florida alone with Neil.

He climbed slowly up the ladder from the aft cabin and went back into the wheelhouse. Neil, who’d heard Jim’s end of the conversation and its abrupt termination, stared forward.

“There’s going to be a war,” Jim stated angrily. “And Frank doesn’t care.”

Neil glanced at Jim and then back forward.

“I don’t know,” Neil replied. “I suppose it’s possible our troops and theirs may be killing each other in a month or two. But maybe the world will pretend everyone’s a guerrilla and we won’t have to call it a war.”

“But there’s that retired general who says we ought to hit Russia before they hit us,” said Jim. “And those TV evangelists say the same. If the Russians read that, then they’ll have to strike first. Don’t you see!?”

“No, Jim…”

“They’re going to do it,” Jim insisted, his long hair falling down his forehead so that it obscured his left eye; he tossed it back angrily. “I know they are. I can feel it!”

Neil looked forward, reminded of a young sailor on his last patrol who had panicked while watching B-52’s bomb the coast two miles away. He knew from Frank that when Jim was fifteen he’d had a bad acid trip, hallucinated an imminent nuclear holocaust, and kept insisting that his family leave the country and fly to Australia. He’d had to be sedated for most of three weeks, and since then, according to Frank, Jim tended to become upset whenever there was an accident at a nuclear power plant or a nuclear test explosion or a threat of war. There’d been a lot to be upset about in the last three years.

“The Russians aren’t going to start a nuclear war,” Neil said softly.

“Then we are!” he shot back. “There’s no way the two sides can go on this way. It’s going to happen!”

“Take it easy, Jim,” Neil rejoined sharply, putting his hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Shouting isn’t going to stop anything.”

“Damn it! You don’t care either.” Jim stood facing Neil defiantly, but Neil didn’t look at him.

“Look,” Neil persisted softly. “It’s no more appropriate to get into a panic now than it would be if we were heading into a storm at sea. You just do what has to be done when it has to be done.”

“We should find a fallout shelter, stock up food. We—”

“Right now,” Neil interrupted firmly, “our job is to sail Vagabond to your father.”

“Oh, Neil,” Jim responded. “It’s so sad. It’s so—”

“Drop it,” said Neil. He was still staring forward. “Here, take the helm,” he went on. “It’s still your watch.” He walked away into the port cockpit and stood with his back to Jim. The shore was far away and only dimly visible now.

He was feeling distinctly uneasy. Jim’s fears struck a responsive chord; he could feel it vibrating in his own gut. A part of him also wanted to return and run back out the mouth that he felt closing now behind them. His instinct was to get out to sea, away from the mess that men might make on land. He turned back to Jim.

“We’re meeting Frank in Crisfield instead of Point Lookout,” he said quietly. “Our course is changed to zero one zero. You got it?”

“Zero one zero,” Jim answered, glancing once at the compass and beginning to turn the wheel to starboard.

As Neil stared ahead he was surprised to find himself wondering anxiously whether Vagabond’s charts of the West Indies were still aboard. Annoyed at his irrationality, he held himself firmly standing in the port cockpit staring at the great expanse of bay lying before him. His course was zero one zero, ten degrees east of north. Getting to Crisfield without an engine was enough to worry about for one day.

Frank felt good. His adrenaline was really flowing. All morning he’d been marching in and out of his office, ordering Rosie and Jason to phone here, phone there, get this, send for that, then marching back to phone someone himself. It was one of those days when he could stare out his office window overlooking lower Manhattan and New York Harbor and feel like a king.

He loved this new crisis. He loved the way it was driving the market down, just as he’d known it would; loved the way it made people edgy, nervous, scared shitless.

A few things had gone wrong during the day—Neil’s report about the bent propeller shaft, the overbooked flights to Washington, Jim’s panic, a real estate deal falling through—but he shook them off like so much dandruff. He was making thousands of dollars an hour by selling short, and by tonight he’d be aboard Vagabond in the Chesapeake and the whole world could blow up and he wouldn’t give a damn.

After he’d talked to Neil and Jimmy at noon and eaten the lunch Rosie brought in for him, he’d put in a call to his broker. As he waited he leaned back in his huge leather chair, his phone at his ear, his long, lanky body stretched out comfortably. He was a good-looking man in his mid-forties with thinning gray hair, warm dark eyes, and an easy grin. His face was deeply creased from his habitual smile.

“Hi, Al,” he said after he’d gotten through. “Selling panic still in full swing?… Down thirty-four points! Jesus, that’s even worse than I thought. Or better.” He laughed shortly, then listened. “Okay, good. Look, I think there’s going to be a turnaround sometime late today—this thing can’t look any worse than it does right now—so I want to take my profits on most of my shorts. Give me the quotes… . Right. Okay. I want to cover the U.S. Home at… what’d you say it was at now?… at 24 then, the Datapoint at 55, and the Microdyne at 30. Got it? All the shares… Yeah, I’ll hold the other two short positions…

“I’m flying down this evening… I’ve got the radiotelephone on the boat, but I don’t like to think about stocks or real estate while I’m at sea. I’ll phone you later today if I haven’t left and we’ll see what we did… Yeah? Thanks. I’m no genius. I just know that with the jerks who end up running countries things have to get very bad before anyone can figure out a way to make ’em better… Okay, Al thanks.”

Well, well, well: even Al seemed worried about a war, poor bastard. Hell, New York City didn’t have anything to worry about. It was such an archetypal center of capitalist decadence the Russians would probably want to preserve it as a historical park for their tourists: porno shops here, Harlem there, Wall Street next… They wouldn’t nuke New York; hell, it would destroy itself in just a few more years.

Frank got up and paced back and forth across the deep rust-colored carpet and then buzzed Rosie to see if Jason had gotten back yet with the propeller shaft from Hempstead. No, but he was on his way. Let’s see, what else for the boat? The new charts of the Chesapeake—he had them. And the bag of specialties Norah had gotten him from Flynn’s delicatessen: caviar, cashews, some of Flynn’s incredible cheeses, two loaves of good bread, and Norah’s own fantastic pies: the sort of stuff Neil never got on board no matter how many times he was told. It was Neil’s one great flaw: he shopped and cooked as if he were feeding a reform school.

But Jesus, was he lucky to have gotten him as captain. Imagine, a naval officer! The guy sailed a couple of thousand miles with as little fuss as most men went to the corner drugstore. He loses his engine to a freak accident and will still probably make it on schedule.

Oh-oh. He hadn’t gotten through to Jeannie Forester yet about the change in plan.

He returned to his big chair, buzzed Rosie, and waited for her to place the call. He felt a warm glow of anticipation for that throaty, sexy voice of hers, sexy especially because she didn’t really mean to be sexy. For two years now Jeannie had become the only thing that ever took his mind off business, and he was aware that whenever he thought of her he fell victim to an almost adolescent melancholy and longing. They’d been friends for five or six years and he knew she must be aware that he’d developed feelings for her beyond friendship. But she wasn’t so much rejecting his feelings as kind of ducking and letting them slide past her.

“Frank, hi,” he heard her say. “Everything still on for the sailing?”

“Hi, Jeannie. Sure,” he replied, smiling at nothing. “Only I’ve had to change my plans for getting to the boat.”

“Are you still coming here this evening?”

“No, that’s just it. I can’t get a flight into Washington, but I got one to the Eastern Shore—Salisbury—and I’m meeting the boat at Crisfield—that’s just across the bay on the eastern side.”

“I know. You want us all to meet you there?”

“No, no. We’ll sail over to Point Lookout and pick you up. Unless something goes wrong, we should still get there late this evening.”

“That’s great. I’m sorry you’re not going to be here though.”

Frank felt himself flush slightly with pleasure. “We’ll see so much of each other in the next ten days, you’ll probably remember with great fondness your last evening without me.”

Jeanne laughed. “I like you, Frank,” she countered, “but I confess I’m a little nervous about spending that much time on the bay. I prefer water to be in a glass or a bathtub.”

“Baloney.”

“No, it’s true. Now that you’ve finally got me to sail with you I’m going to be the worst kind of landlubber.”

“You’re a terrific swimmer,” said Frank.

“Only when I can see both the bottom and other end of the pool,” she replied. “Hold it a sec,” she added, and her next words were spoken to someone in the room with her. “What’s that, Rita? No. In the second drawer, I think. With the clippings from the Post… Sorry, Frank, where were we?”

“What was that all about?”

“My antinuke group is meeting here today,” she answered. “Emergency meeting because of the Arabian mess.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” said Frank, made uncomfortable by the subject. Jeannie became too emotional about any kind of war scare. He thought of making a joke about her group’s being sure to stop the war for at least ten more days so they could finish their cruise, but stopped himself. “It’s a tough situation,” he finally said lamely.

“I’ve lost heart,” she replied with unexpected weariness. “We haven’t accomplished anything in these four years. And now it’s really hopeless. I feel like a fool for even trying.”

“Well, maybe that’s good,” Frank said. “Shows you need a vacation.”

“I suppose so,” she replied after a pause. “Some of my friends think I’m going off to fiddle while Rome burns.”

“No, you don’t,” he said firmly. “You’ve promised me. Let Rome burn.”

“I know, Frank, I’ll be there. Tonight, I hope, or tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“At Point Lookout.”

“Fine. What, Rita?… Okay. Frank, look, I guess I’ve got to go. I’m looking forward to the sail and… I’ve got to go.”

“Sure, Jeannie. See you soon.”

“Bye, Frank.”

Frank lowered the receiver slowly back onto its cradle and sighed, feeling that ridiculous tingling she somehow created in him. Then he shook his head and grunted. Why did she bother with that anti-war stuff? Peace groups had been marching and protesting for five years, but peace demonstrations never stopped a war and never would. They only weakened the unlucky country that let them get too influential.

Sighing again, he leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly, looking out at the sky above the harbor past the twin Trade towers. He had finally gotten her to go sailing with him though. In the past he’d invited her and her husband, Bob, and always ended up getting stuck with just Bob. It was strange. An outdoorsy woman like Jeannie, good swimmer, tennis player, hiker—why the aversion to water? Or was it her way of resisting him? He knew that he liked her a lot more than was good for either of them, but he hadn’t done much about it so far. But now for ten days they’d be together on Vagabond.

His intercom buzzed, and Rosie’s crisp voice informed him that his wife was on the line. He remembered he’d promised to call her.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he boomed out when he heard her soft, musical voice through the phone. “Yep. Everything’s go for this afternoon. I… What?… Oh, don’t be silly, it’s just a war scare. Like the last time. A lot of sound and fury signifying—” Frank frowned and grimaced as he listened.

“No, no, no,” he finally interrupted. “It’s going to be all right. Bob Forester says it’s all just a big bluff, the Pentagon and the Russians know exactly what they’re doing…” Again he listened for a while, and then broke in.

“Hey, more good news. You should be proud of me. I made over eight thousand dollars on my shorts today… No… no, not that kind of shorts… stocks, selling stocks short, you know… He’s fine. Captain Loken just told me he was a great sailor. Brought the ship single-handed through a terrific storm. When the sail… What?… No, no, no, there wasn’t any storm… I was just exaggera— He’s fine, I tell you. I bet he looks like a bronze Greek god. He’s so good-looking, it’s obscene. Girls’ll be coming into heat all over the Chesapeake… Damn it, no. If there was going to be a war, they would have mentioned it in The Wall Street Journal… Yeah, yeah, right, sweetheart. Look, I got to get going to the airport… Ten days… Oh, sure, don’t worry… Good-bye, honey… Right… You too… So long.”

Frowning, Frank hung up. In the last year or two Norah seemed to be all anxiety, mostly about Jimmy, her “baby,” but sometimes about everything. Maybe that’s where Jimmy got his panic from. He was glad Susan was home from college while he and Jimmy were off cruising. Norah needed company these days, but couldn’t join them in the Chesapeake until the last weekend of the cruise.

Rosie buzzed again.

“Mr. Tyler on the line.”

“Put him on,” said Frank, reaching for the phone to speak to George Tyler, a partner in several real estate ventures.

“Well, Frank, it was no go,” Tyler’s voice announced loudly, as if all important news had to be shouted. “I’m afraid Mulweather called and gave me some cock-and-bull story that boils down to the fact that his clients are considering backing out of the West Eightieth Street deal.”

“What the hell. Why?”

“My guess is that his clients decided that an apartment house, no matter how attractive, tends to lose its cash flow when reduced to rubble.”

Frank didn’t reply, stunned by the sardonic comment.

“Well,” he said after a pause. “I don’t think cash or stocks sitting at Chase are going to retain much of their value either when they’re fluttering down over the Atlantic in a million pieces.”

“I know,” said Tyler with incongruous cheerfulness, “but what are we going to do? Mulweather found a clause in our preliminary agreement, and he can back out. In this climate I think everyone’s more interested in vacationing in Tierra del Fuego than in negotiating any new business deals.”

Frank could feel himself becoming unreasonably angry at Mulweather and his clients for being panicked out of a deal that would make good money for all parties concerned. He stared gloomily at his desk.

“Okay, George, keep after it,” he finally said with a sigh. “Make them feel like they’re chicken or something. Maybe they’ll change their minds next week.”

After Tyler had hung up, Frank felt depressed. Worse, it was getting late. What time was it? Almost four. Jesus, he had to be at La Guardia by five for his flight to Salisbury, so he’d have to hurry it.

He made one last call to his broker and learned that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down something like fifty-one points, the highspeed printer still almost twenty minutes behind. When he hung up, even though he’d made money on his shorting, he was even more depressed. As he rose and began to gather up his things for the boat he remembered his own favorite axiom with a strange sense of irritation. The stock market never lies…

By late afternoon the Chesapeake was as still as a pond. Only the tiniest breaths of wind occasionally hinted at movement, and Captain Olly and his son, Chris, worked steadily in the clear sunshine, enjoying the luxury of the calm water. They were harvesting their last oyster bed, using the long wooden shafts of their rakelike metal tongs with practiced ease. Both Captain Olly, a small, wizened old man, wrinkled and bald, and his twenty-year-old son, a thickset, husky youth, had huge forearms and biceps from their years of working the oyster beds. Their twenty-seven-foot fishing smack, Lucy Mae, with only a small deckhouse forward and a huge well aft for depositing the oysters, was old and paint-chipped and heeled over groggily as both men leaned out over the same side.

The two men had been working the beds since one o’clock that afternoon, starting a couple of hours before the three P.M. low tide. They planned to quit a couple of hours after the tide turned. In all that time their work proceeded in a casual, persistent rhythm, Olly talking away occasionally in what seemed like stream-of-consciousness monologues, Chris, quiet, steady, always puffing on a cigarette, now and then grunting a comment or asking a question. When Olly would lapse into silence or lean on his rake, Chris would continue raking, wielding the heavy tongs until he could feel that he had a full load, then raising them to the surface and depositing their contents on the afterdeck. Most of the sorting would come later. The monologues and silences succeeded each other in a mood as relaxed as the becalmed bay. Chris would occasionally down a bottle of beer, his father a glass of water, sometimes “colored” with a dash of whiskey. They never had to talk about their work; they knew their routine so thoroughly they could have oystered efficiently from dawn to dusk and not uttered a word. Smith Island, their home, lay to the east of them, Tangier Island to the south, and Point Lookout and the wide mouth of the Potomac to the west.

As Captain Olly neared the end of his working day he was feeling depressed by how tired he felt. After less than four hours work his back ached, and if he didn’t stop and lean on his rake handle every five minutes or so, he got winded. This embarrassed him, and he knew that even if he tried to pretend to be so absorbed in his own monologues that he couldn’t work, Chris would be able to tell he was shirking.

Ever since Jill had run off to Florida two years ago with Cap’n Smithers, his life had gone downhill. It was the first time since he was fourteen he hadn’t had a woman reg’lar, and he felt his health was deteriorating fast as a result. The main reason he went oystering with Chris most every day was so he wouldn’t get stuck alone in his house watching the TV. A man could go nuts watching those game shows and soaps.

“I don’t know, son,” he found himself saying in an effort to cheer himself up, “seems to me some of these oysters must have meningitis or something. Seem sorta stunted. We may have to sell them to the circus as midgets.” He had deposited a load of oysters and muck onto the deck and was staring at it with exaggerated gloom. “Though I s’pose midgets ain’t in fashion anymore, even in the circus. People these days want things big: big money, big boats, big tits.” As he wiped the sweat from his bald head he squinted southward at a couple of sailboats sitting like marble monuments in the bay. That’ll teach ’em, he thought vaguely, the rich playboy good-for-nothings.

“They even seem to want their wars bigger these days,” he went on, turning back to his work, “settin’ up there in Moscow and Washington calculatin’ how they can build a real big elephantlike war that’ll flatten the earth like a pancake so the gods can use it for a Frisbee…”

As Olly lowered his tongs back into the water Chris allowed himself an unaccustomed pause in his work.

“There ain’t gonna be a war, is there, pop?” he asked.

“Well, now, you know I never predict what the rake’ll bring up,” he snapped back automatically, “but I got to say that imagination ain’t created the stupid terrible thing which man ain’t fool enough to up and do.”

“They ain’t fighting yet,” Chris commented, pausing to light a fresh cigarette.

“The way I figure it is the only reason they ain’t made a Frisbee of earth before this is that they got a lot of smaller terrible things they want to do first.” Olly spat over the side of the boat into the bay. That’s my great hope for mankind, he thought. Man’s got so many little sins he’s got the hots for, he’ll never get around to the big one.

“You think so?” his son asked after a pause.

“Course I don’t think so,” Captain Olly snapped back irritably, again wiping his sweaty forehead with his thick-veined right arm. “You know I don’t like to do any thinking.” He chuckled. “Whenever I think—get a really deep thought, you know?—I always have to take a crap.” He paused and glared at his son, his eyes twinkling. “Standing at the helm alone in a blow, I got to watch my mind like a cat, be sure no deep thoughts come, cause taking a crap on a bouncy ship when you’re alone at the helm and it’s all you can do just standing, much less squatting, over a pail on a roller coaster while you’re watching the compass and sail and handling the wheel is a trick I done once but don’t hanker to do again.”

He paused and frowned in concentration.

“The deep thought I had that time was ‘Time will tell.’ See? Deep thoughts just ain’t worth the fuss and bother.”

As he looked with mock severity at his son, who grinned back at him, Olly remembered that sail: in the old Chesapeake Bay skipjack that he’d owned and captained, dragging for oysters in those days instead of fiddling around with these tiny rakes. But he couldn’t afford a skipjack now and couldn’t pull his weight as crew, so he’d settled for Lucy Mae. It kept him alive, but barely.

Shit, he thought, as he had to pause again, I wish to hell I’d just get it over with and croak. Not much sense in living if you can’t work and can’t fuck. Nowadays, when he’d go into restaurants or bars and flirt with the cute little taut-butted waitresses, they’d either be shocked at him or treat him like a harmless child. When a man couldn’t turn on a woman, it was time to cash in his chips. Women used to always be pestering him, first for his cock and then for his deep thoughts; he wished one was pestering him now.

“Women are always asking what I’m thinking.” He spoke aloud, watching three seagulls fly noisily around the stern of Lucy Mae and then plop expectantly into the bay. “But after four wives I finally figured how to handle ’em. I always say I’m thinking about the wind and weather and repairing my dinghy and how much I love her ass. Well, every woman I’ve known will frown and frown and frown until I get to my deep thoughts about her ass, and then everything’s jolly. A man who limits his deep thoughts to his woman’s ass is a sober man, trustworthy and true, and likely to stay out of trouble.”

Chris was smiling as he worked, but Olly’s face was as stern as a Baptist preacher’s. He paused and took a long drink of water from the glass on the deckhouse shelf. He damn well wished he had a lady these days whose ass he could praise, even if her ass was flatter than an ironing board.

“Gettin’ late, pop,” Chris said, making him suddenly aware he was leaning on his rake again.

“Late!” Olly snapped back. “We just begun.” But he began to clean out his rake with a sense of relief. “I been talkin’ so much today I’m pooped,” he added.

I do love talking, he thought as he emptied his last load into the boat. Especially my own talking. As Chris’s mother once said, I think it was his mother, could’ve been someone else’s, “Olly, I never know’d a man who listened to hisself as good as you do.” He smiled.

“Cal Markham said this morning the radio makes it sound like war,” Chris suddenly said as if it had been on his mind much of the day. Olly looked at him in surprise.

“Son, you got to stop listening to people who babble,” he said firmly. “Course there’s gonna be a war. They ain’t keepin’ all those jets dancing across the sky just for skywriting forever, you know. A gov’ment is a business, and sooner or later the gov’ment is gonna want its money’s worth.”

His son looked at him with youthful seriousness.

“What you gonna do, pop, when that happens?” he asked.

Captain Olly tossed his empty tongs into the forward cabin with a sense of relief and then stared out across the water.

“I’m gonna run, son,” he said with a sigh. “That’s why I’m gonna take up jogging. I would have taken it up years ago, but I ain’t learned how to do it on water yet. Christ knows the Chesapeake’s got enough mud in it to support a man three times my weight, but somehow I just can’t get the hang of it.”

He wouldn’t run though. He would almost welcome it if it came, especially if the war would just take him and let Chris live to enjoy asses for another forty years as he had done. He’d always hated seeing old geezers sitting around in front of the general store, useless and unneeded, and although he was probably now a geezer, he wasn’t gonna be a sitter.

No, he wouldn’t run—unless he figured there was a live lady up the road a ways, or a solid bit of honest work he could do. Then maybe he’d stick around. Take up jogging.

Lethargically Jeanne gathered up and packed her clothes and sleeping bags for the cruise aboard Vagabond. She had no heart for the trip, no heart, really, for anything these days. She was packing only for herself, Lisa, and Skip, since Bob had telephoned at three that afternoon to tell her that the Defense Department had asked everyone over the level of G-2 to work over the weekend. He couldn’t sail with them in the Chesapeake. He would be coming home only to eat and get a change of clothes.

As she moved around Skippy’s bedroom and then her own, Jeanne was close to tears. It was anger and frustration at the insane way the Americans and Russians were stumbling toward war, frustration at her own incapacity to do anything, anger at Bob’s failure even to see what was happening, anger that she was married to him. Normally lithe, catlike, and intense, she moved dully, her long dark hair hanging limply down her back instead of bouncing as it usually did when she moved. She felt she had married the wrong man and was living only half a life. As she carefully closed her suitcase she imagined Bob’s superior, ironic smile at such a cliché. He would assure her that, of course, she had married the wrong man, everybody did, but that was no reason to be miserable.

Lisa came into her bedroom to ask if she could go visit her girl friend Nancy before dinner, and Jeanne had to focus her eyes for a moment to see her daughter clearly. Framed in the doorway, Lisa held her tall, budding fifteen-year-old body with that strange, stiff dignity she’d adopted over the last two years to show she was no longer a child. It irritated Jeanne, reminding her of the worst of the Forester family stuffiness. Compared to Lisa, round, energetic, happy-faced Skippy still seemed, at five, spontaneous and free.

“Have you finished your packing?” she asked.

“I did it last night,” Lisa replied. “But don’t forget to pack the lotions and towels you promised.”

“I will, I will. But look, honey. I need your help here. We’ll be eating as soon as your father gets home, and I’d like you to go downstairs and start heating up the leftover stew. I’ll be down soon.”

“Oh, Mother,” Lisa replied. “Can’t you do that?”

“Go!” said Jeanne.

And she went, with a promptness that never ceased to amaze Jeanne—was that Bob’s doing?—and in another moment she was alone again with her two suitcases and her sleeping bags.

Living with Bob wasn’t working anymore, and she knew why: the war thing had gotten too big, and was too important to both of them. The whole world was divided into two groups, those desperately trying to avoid a war and those desperately trying to make sure that their side won it. She and Bob were on opposite sides, and the tension between them was becoming too strong.

The tension often tempted her just to give up. The cause she was working for seemed so hopeless. For close to three years she’d been active in a Washington-based group called SMN, Stop the Madness Now, an eclectic collection of feminists, political radicals, pacifists, scientists, doctors, and even a few former high-ranking military officers, all of whom agreed on only one issue: the necessity of taking drastic action to reverse the momentum toward nuclear war. She’d begun as a volunteer, in effect an unpaid secretary, but a year ago had been put on part-time staff as fund-raiser and occasional speech writer and editor for one of the retired admirals.

But her promotion had, over the last six months, only made her increasingly depressed. The admiral spoke to the same audiences; the fund-raising events raised the same piddling amounts of money—their yearly total budget would barely finance the cost of a single jet fighter; the letters got published in The Washington Post and The New York Times and sank out of sight like pebbles in the sea; the marches got marched—and forgotten; and the great masses of Americans, vaguely worried about war, remained quite precisely and seriously worried about how they were going to meet their mortgage payments or feed their children. The prolonged worldwide economic crisis, which was so critically exacerbating global political tensions, also made the tasks of reducing nuclear armaments and creating a United Nations superforce very low priorities on most people’s agendas. The United States and the Soviet Union argued and maneuvered for power; she and Bob argued and maneuvered for… for what she didn’t know, and all four sides became increasingly alienated from one another.

Bob came home at six, gave a big hug to Skippy, a dignified kiss to Lisa, several words and caresses to their terrier, Banjo, and a cheerful “Hi, honey” to her. He went straight upstairs to change his clothes and pack an overnight bag. Ten minutes later they all had dinner together.

Jeanne’s scruffy jeans, open-necked cotton blouse, and her long dark hair falling wildly about her face and shoulders contrasted sharply with her husband’s neat three-piece suit, neatly combed dark hair, and chiseled good looks, but she sensed that their moods were aligned: they were both subdued and anxious, hoping to control their conflict. They sat at opposite ends of the table with Lisa on Jeanne’s left and Skip, propped up on two pillows, on her right. Lisa looked to Jeanne that evening, with her erect posture and precise, adult-sounding speech patterns, like a young governess in some Victorian melodrama. Her husband was the villain. And she…?

She certainly no longer felt like a heroine. Now that her sporadic idealistic efforts to promote disarmament and peace had proved to be so clearly ineffective, she felt as weak and foolish as Bob had always accused her of being. Yet as she watched him eating his dinner so meticulously and talking with such total seriousness with Lisa about the clothing she planned to take with her, she could feel herself getting angry. It was her anxiety being transmuted into anger, anger at those who were causing her to be afraid: the Russians and the Pentagon and people like Bob, who could so coolly calculate and contemplate the probabilities of various world catastrophes.

“And what are you going to be doing, daddy?” Jeanne heard Lisa say, and saw Bob start in surprise that the forbidden subject had been broached.

“Just playing with Mars,” he replied with a soft smile. He poured himself more wine and awkwardly signaled with the bottle to ask her if she wanted some more. She shook her head.

“Is that all you ever do?” Lisa asked, a little impatiently.

“I suppose so,” he replied. “But the situation these days has been changing so fast we have to feed our monster fresh food five times a day instead of once or twice a week.” She noticed his eyes flash as he said this.

“It still sounds boring,” said Lisa.

“Calculating the probability of various war scenarios is many things, some of which your mother has strong feelings about,” Bob replied, “but one thing it never is, is boring.”

“You’re enjoying this crisis, aren’t you?” Jeanne said quietly as she leaned forward to wipe some spilled gravy from Skip’s shirt. “I suppose for you it’s like playing in the Superbowl.”

Bob put down his fork and took a sip of wine.

“People are rather interested in our calculations these days,” he said, smiling nervously. “I’m human enough to enjoy using my capabilities to the fullest and knowing I’m needed.”

“That’s fine,” Jeanne said slowly. “But are you also human enough to be scared?”

He looked startled, then laughed.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied. “The world is in a critically dangerous situation. I’m rather proud that our department, probably more than any other, is responsible for determining just how dangerous.”

“Why proud?” she asked quietly. Whenever they began to argue, their voices would get softer and softer, a trait that she realized she had adopted from him. Their civility went with the French Provincial furniture, but she had once told him that if he ever really got mad at her, his voice would get so low no one could hear it.

“Because we’re the ones who can warn the President which of his policy decisions are most dangerous,” Bob answered. “Without us he might do something that would provoke the Soviets into attacking us.”

Jeanne took a last spoonful of stew and wiped her mouth.

“And does your computer tell you what happens if they do attack?” she asked next.

“No, Jupiter does,” Bob replied, absently pushing Skippy’s hand away from the plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Jupiter calculates who will probably win once a war starts. We on Mars just calculate the chances of a war’s starting.”

“And what are the chances?” she asked with a coolness she didn’t feel. “Pretty high, aren’t they?”

He looked at her somberly and shook his head.

“You know better than that,” he replied. “Obviously no one really knows, not even Mars, and if it did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“But if I thought I knew, I’d bundle you and the kids off to the South Pacific. I certainly wouldn’t be chatting with you ten miles from the White House with a glass of wine in my hand.”

“Instead you send me off to the Chesapeake,” she countered, feeling even as she spoke that it was a childish remark.

“I do want you to go, Jeanne,” he said to her with unusual seriousness.

“Why?” she answered, frowning. “You know I’m not fond of being on the water, and it’s no safer there than anyplace else.”

“Because I want you and the children to get away and have a good time,” he replied. “Lisa’s always had a crush on Jimmy,” he went on, smiling at his daughter, “and Neil Loken’s a hunk, if you like the type.”

“Give me back my cookie!” Skippy said abruptly.

“What’s the type?” Jeanne asked, remembering that the previous summer Bob had found the captain officious and remote.

“You’ve had enough,” announced Lisa.

“Horatio Hornblower,” Bob replied. “The quiet he-man always standing tall on the poopdeck squinting into the salt spray, letting everyone know he’s in command.”

“I have not,” Skippy whispered in his squeaky voice. “I’ve had six, same as you.”

“Well, we’ve had enough.”

“You make him sound like a pain in the neck,” said Jeanne.

“I have not,” Skippy said firmly. “Give me—”

“Let go!” Lisa hissed as Skippy’s little body sprawled across the tablecloth, lunging for the plate of cookies.

“Ouch! You shit!” said Skippy.

“Skip!” Bob Forester exclaimed. “Don’t swear like that, and sit down!”

“She pinched me.”

“Lisa, leave Skip’s punishment to us,” Jeanne said wearily.

“He was stealing a cookie,” Lisa insisted with dignity.

“I was not!” Skippy exclaimed.

Bob erupted finally from his chair and pulled his son firmly back into his seat, twice striking him sharply on the hand, Jeanne wincing with each slap. As the boy pouted and fought back tears Bob resumed his seat and looked self-consciously back at Lisa and Jeanne.

“Yes, now, where were we?” he said.

“At sea,” said Jeanne ironically.

“Oh, yes, Neil,” Bob went on, adjusting his cloth napkin in his lap, his narrow eyes scowling. “He’s too quiet to be a pain in the neck.” His eyes crinkled into a smile. “You have to be aware of his loud quietness in order to be annoyed. Some people like him. Women, I imagine, would find him attractive.”

“Not if he never leaves the poopdeck,” Jeanne commented.

Bob glanced at his watch and stood up, smiling awkwardly.

“Oh, Frank tells me he’s perfectly willing to come down to… shall we say, ride frailer vessels?”

Jeanne glanced over at Lisa.

“Daddy means he can be a makeout artist,” she explained to her mother.

Jeanne laughed for the first time that day.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.

“Mommy?” said Skippy.

“Yes, dear?”

“If there’s going to be a war, I think we should eat all the cookies now.” And this time they all laughed.

But when Bob prepared to return to Washington twenty minutes later, she didn’t laugh.

He called her over to him and took her in his arms and said simply, “I love you.” For years he hadn’t said the words; their separations were marked by such parting comments as “Where did you leave the keys to the Rabbit?” or “I hope you left the refrigerator well stocked.” But that evening, just when she felt herself most alienated from him and their life together, he said, “I love you.”

She looked across at him, her large dark eyes widening with both surprise and attention.

“All right” was all she could say.

“Go down to Point Lookout tonight,” he went on. “Get on the boat. Forget the mess the world’s in.”

Again at first she could only stare at him.

“You come too,” she said impulsively, feeling a sudden fear.

“I’ve got my job,” he said.

“Leave it,” she countered desperately.

He smiled softly, a tinge of sadness in it.

“I like my job,” he replied.

And she felt the wall fall between them again. As he started to turn, though, she grasped his arm and held it.

“You’re a good man,” she said.

“Really?” he said, with that same half-sad smile.

They looked at each other, and for the first time she saw that he was afraid too. Then she saw the emotion click off and the computer come back on. He frowned.

“Did you remember to get some frozen dinners in the freezer?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Good,” he said, pecked her cheek, and was gone.

With Vagabond becalmed Neil finally had Jim put the seven-horsepower outboard on the inflatable dinghy to tow the trimaran into the docks of Tangier Island. Earlier, even after the wind had fallen to mere puffs in the late afternoon, they’d been able to ride the incoming tide northward toward Crisfield. But as the sun set and the tide was about to turn against them they were still almost fifteen miles short of their goal. Finding himself only a mile off the little village of Tangier and needing to let Frank know what had happened to them, Neil had Vagabond towed in with the dinghy.

He moored her at the end of the gas dock, which was closed for the night. With her three white hulls gleaming under the glow of the dock lights, the fifty-foot trimaran lay among the old fishing boats and conventional stinkpots like a futuristic fighter plane among World War II relics. But towing her in was a joke: like pulling a space satellite with a tricycle.

While he had Jim secure and adjust the spring lines and fenders he went into his cabin to change for going ashore. He was tired now, the dull fatigue of trying for six hours to nurse a sailing vessel toward her goal with winds that sometimes wouldn’t ruffle a feather on a flea. He poured himself a shot of brandy and switched on the shortwave radio. After he had pulled off his blue jean cutoffs, he stood naked for a moment trying to tune in the BBC frequency. He finally located it and, after pulling on a pair of pants, sat back on his bunk with the brandy and listened. The cultured English announcer reported with the usual stylized indifference that a flotilla of thirty private boats had left England for Ireland or the Azores, that international flights out of the country were booked solid, with near hysteria reigning at Heathrow. The exodus was stirring up a national outcry, and one M.P. categorized the fugitives as “no better than rats deserting a sinking ship,” an analogy that made Neil smile sardonically: “sinking ship” was a devastatingly apt metaphor for Great Britain on the eve of a possible nuclear war.

When the BBC announcer began to discuss more parochial events, Neil turned the set off.

He was tired and depressed, a combination he knew from experience often went together. He felt a restless need for a woman, a feeling he knew was often associated with low-level anxiety. It was the Mideast crisis, of course, but also the fact that in a few hours Frank would be joining them and Neil would lose his freedom. He always resented it when an owner first rejoined a boat he’d been living aboard as captain and king. The owner inevitably liked to run things differently, and he hated to relinquish the control that was his when he was sailing with just a crew. Frank was about the only owner he’d sailed with who consistently shared Neil’s exhilaration at the grueling joys of an ocean passage; Frank genuinely loved sailing, loved being out on the water, and wasn’t aboard simply to impress clients or make a few women, but Neil was still a little depressed at the prospect of his return.

Jim interrupted his gloom by shouting down the hatchway that he was going to change and spruce up. Neil stood up and searched for a clean sport shirt. Jim might be a sailor like his father, but this trip north had been too easy a passage to be a true test. In the last four hours of their crawling with the tide Jim had given up on sailing and spent his time with his guitar and cassette player. Well, that was cool. He himself had read half a novel.

Glancing at his watch he saw that it was nine ten. He quickly switched on the shortwave radio again and tried tuning it to a ham radio operator he’d discovered on the trip north who broadcast sometimes at nine. After the news from the BBC, listening to a farmer from East Tennessee might be a welcome relief. Soon he had located the farmer’s gruff voice, speaking as usual in a casual folksy monologue as if he were chatting with neighbors around a hot wood stove in mid-winter.

“…not everyone so happy. Mel Hutchins says the rain we got last night was too much for his spring rye and not enough for his tomatoes. Course Mel wouldn’t be satisfied unless God rearranged the whole upper atmosphere every day to reroute the right weather patterns over ever’ one of Mel’s seventy acres. Last time I known Mel to praise the weather was when the remains of a hurricane struck here one October after he’d harvested everything, but Jack Pillitson had half his crops still in the ground. Mel and Jack don’t get along too well, and Mel said the hurricane showed good timing.

“It’s getting towards sign-off time. I sure hope the Russians stop their messing around over there in Arabia. Izzy Klein says people thinking there may be a war cleaned out half his A&P this morning— and that was before he opened. Just joking, friends. He did say it appeared that everyone in town seemed to be expecting guests this weekend and had to stock up on three times the normal amount of food. Well, as for me, if I thought there was going to be a war, you wouldn’t catch me buying canned baked beans, and you wouldn’t catch me sitting in a fallout shelter next to anyone who had. That’s sure enough not the way I want to go. But I don’t expect to die for a while yet, so I’ll be talking to you again on Sunday. This is Charlie Wittner signing off.”

When Wittner’s voice died away, Neil smiled and stood up. At least there was one man who was showing no panic.

Up on deck, under the star-studded sky, Jim was waiting for him, dressed like Neil in jeans, sport shirt, and deck shoes. Jim hadn’t shaved since they’d left Fort Lauderdale, and his slight beard, longish hair—salt and sun-streaked—and bronzed skin tone gave him precisely the salty air he probably was trying to achieve. He looked as pleasantly excited as he had when they’d entered the Chesapeake sixteen hours earlier.

The only bar in Tangier was a fisherman’s hangout rather than a tourist trap, so there were no fishing nets on the walls or stuffed fish, but instead dart boards, video games, pool tables, and a television set. There were half a dozen men sitting at the bar and two old men playing chess at a table. Neil led Jim to a booth next to the bar; through the window they could see Vagabond’s masts and cabin top above the docks and pilings.

“Where you fellas in from?” a large bearded man with a pot belly asked them from his seat at the bar.

“Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” Jim answered proudly. “We made it in five and a half days.”

“That’s pretty good,” the bearded man replied promptly. “That must be one hell of a powerful dinghy engine.”

While Jim looked startled and uncertain, Neil and the men along the bar all burst out laughing. Jim, realizing they’d seen Vagabond’s entrance, soon joined them.

“Once or twice we cheated and used sails,” Neil said, and remembered he had to phone to get a message to Frank.

“Don’t blame you,” said the man.

Neil stood up, went to the bar to order two beers, and then went over to the pay phone. The wife of the marina owner answered, and Neil explained the situation to her and asked her to tell Frank to take the ferry to Tangier. When he returned to his table, he was glad the television set wasn’t on to remind Jim of the outside world.

“Well, mate,” he said to Jim after he’d taken a long swallow of beer, “I’d say we’d made a damn good passage, even if we did fall a little short.”

“Vagabond’s a great boat, isn’t she?” Jim said.

“She even tows well,” Neil replied with a smile.

“I like crewing for you,” Jim went on. “It’s a lot better when there are only two of us. With Dad and his friends I feel like a passenger. I never get to do anything. But being alone at the helm, especially at night, or when she’s surfing down a big swell…” He stopped, smiling, flushed with the pleasure of the memory. “Anyway, I really enjoyed your putting me to work.”

“I wish all my crew would say that,” Neil commented, smiling.

“Blast ’em, I say. Hit ’em first,” came a voice from the bar.

“You tell ’em, Charlie,” another voice countered. “And don’t forget to duck.”

“Hey, my friend,” Neil said to the large man at the end of the bar, hoping to change the subject. “Are there any women on this island?”

“Oh, yes, there’s women all right.”

“You keep them locked up?”

“Don’t have to,” the bearded man replied. “We keep ’em so tired from screwin’ they ain’t got no energy to go out.”

Laughter tumbled along the length of the bar.

“Must be all the oysters you fellas eat,” Neil suggested.

“Eat oysters!?” the bearded man exclaimed, grinning. “Shit, us baymen can’t afford to eat oysters. Too expensive.”

A few men laughed.

“Still,” said Neil. “It’s too bad you don’t have a few women in especially good shape to greet tired sailors returning to land after a long stint at sea.”

“We got two or three ladies like that,” a little man next to the bearded man said. “But they always get themselves laid by tourists in speedboats from the Eastern Shore—men who tell ’em they’re all pooped from motoring ’cross the bay.”

The quick burst of laughter at this remark made Neil think it was an allusion to some actual women they all knew. He finished his beer and went to the bar to order two more. As he was standing there a pudgy woman came in and complained to the bartender, “The TV don’t work.” Could he fix it? After handing Neil two bottles of beer and making change, he followed her through a doorway into what were probably living quarters.

“See what we mean?” the little man at the bar said, turning to grin at Neil. “Ol’ Jake’s going back there now to give her a quick one. That TV business is all a front.”

But Jake returned almost immediately with a frown on his face. He went up to the television set above the bar and turned it on. Neil and the others were all watching him. The screen remained dark for a few seconds, but the voice of the talking head that appeared on the screen immediately began in a tense, hurried voice:

“…I repeat, this is not a test, this is not a test. The Emergency Broadcasting System announces a national war alert. All precautionary measures should be taken immediately to prepare for the possibility of an enemy attack. This is not a test. Civil Defense workers are to report immediately to their assigned posts. Police, fire, and emergency medical personnel on standby for national war alert should also report to their assigned posts. I repeat, this is not a test, this is not a test. The Emergency Broadcasting System is announcing a national war alert. All precautionary…”

It was only when he realized that the announcer was not going to say anything else that Neil became aware of himself standing next to his table, still holding his beer bottle, his mouth open in stunned bewilderment. As the bartender lowered the volume and began switching channels—and Neil could see the same announcer flash by on all the operating channels—he also became aware of the total silence in the room.

Finally someone at the bar spoke.

“Oh, good Jesus,” a tired voice said. “Wow what the fuck are the silly bastards trying to prove?”

Then the television picture disappeared, the lights in the bar went out, and the whole room was in total darkness.

Frank flung his lanky body back and forth across the end of the ferry dock at Crisfield with an impatience unusual even for him. Everything was running late. Traffic had been so bad going out to La Guardia that afternoon that the twenty-five-minute drive had taken over an hour, and he’d arrived ten minutes after his plane was supposed to have taken off. But La Guardia was a madhouse, and his plane was delayed forty minutes, so he’d made it. Then it was delayed another half-hour on the runway awaiting takeoff, the long line of taxiing planes reminding him of sailors outside a Bangkok whorehouse.

So he’d arrived in Salisbury almost an hour late, taken an agonizing thirty minutes to rent a car (so much for O.J. Simpson flying through the airport), and finally made it to Crisfield after nine o’clock in the evening.

And no Vagabond. When he’d inquired at the marina, it had taken him so long to find someone with a message from Neil that he figured he’d missed the last ferry to Tangier Island. The damn woman said only that Neil was becalmed at Tangier and to take the ferry. But there was now a light breeze blowing. Would Neil try to sail on to Crisfield?

Then it turned out he hadn’t missed the last ferry, because the last ferry hadn’t even gotten back in from Tangier. So he was pacing back and forth across the dock, a half-dozen locals sitting on the waiting benches staring at him as if he were a performing acrobat. He didn’t care. He had the new propeller shaft, he had his fishing gear and swimsuits and scuba equipment, and he was eager to be out

on the bay. The smell of salt water and dead fish had even eased his annoyance at first, since he felt such a sudden stab of joy after nothing but the smells of Manhattan for three months.

Finally the lights of the tiny ferry appeared in the distance. Frank placed himself at the edge of the dock, leaning out toward it, as if he were a magnet capable of drawing the stupid thing in faster. The local fishermen and their families simply sat there smoking and joking and generally behaving with that air of calm self-sufficiency that drove Frank crazy—until he’d been aboard Vagabond for a few days and began to recreate it for himself.

The ferry was a big launch with a long deckhouse roof and six or seven benches that would probably seat forty people during the height of the tourist season. There were only four people coming off the island.

Some of the locals came up as the boat approached the dock and took the two mooring lines. A skinny little man was at the wheel and a young kid put out the fenders. When the launch was secured, the little man came out of the wheelhouse, puffing on a pipe. After Frank had walked back to where he had left his duffel bags and then got himself and his stuff onto the ferry, the captain helped a woman he apparently knew to climb on board.

“You folks heah about the woah?” he asked her and the two men with her.

“What war is that, Cap?” one of the men asked in return.

“I don’t know as whether they’ve named it yet,” he answered, a quizzical frown on his round face. “But it’s another one of our woahs.”

“What do you mean?” the woman asked nervously, sitting down next to Frank on a middle bench.

“My radio says theah’s going to be a woah. With the Russians.”

“Oh, that,” said Frank, feeling the tension that the captain’s vague statements had created beginning to lessen.

“When’d you hear this?” another man asked.

“Five minutes ago, I’d guess,” the captain said. “Made it seem pretty impohtant. National emergency or something. Like an air-raid wahning.”

“Air-raid warning for where?” Frank asked irritably.

“Well, I guess for just about the whole country,” the little man replied.

“What are you going to do about it, Cap?” the first man asked.

“Not much I can do till I finish this last ferry trip,” he said, motioning to the kid to free the mooring lines.

“Has anyone been killed yet?” the woman asked.

“Not that they mentioned,” the captain replied as he went through to the wheelhouse. He turned back to them when he got halfway to the wheel. “They just kep’ saying emergency,” he concluded.

The forty-five-foot ferry swung out of the dock area and began its hour-and-a-half-long trip through the darkness to Tangier. Frank leaned back on the bench, hugging his right knee for balance, and sensed the anxiety rising within him. It was one thing to have a war scare but another to declare some sort of national emergency that made people start telling their neighbors there was a war.

He stared unseeingly off to his right and began to consider the effect an escalation of the panic might have on his business fortunes when a glow caught his attention. He concentrated his attention to his right.

There was a strange, steadily increasing glow across the bay, like the lights of a huge city being slowly turned on. It didn’t seem like-fire; the light was too diffuse, too much just a glow. Unless it was a long way off.

“What’s that?” the woman next to him asked the man beside her. Along with the seven or eight other passengers Frank watched fascinated as the light, like the spreading hood of a cobra, slowly loomed up to fill the sky. Feeling a stab of horror he stood up.

“Looks like a fire,” someone said.

Frank pushed past the knees of the two people next to him and strode forward to the wheelhouse.

“What’s our heading?” he asked the little captain in the dimly lit wheelhouse.

“Heading?” the little man asked, squinting up at him.

Frank could read the compass bearing for himself by the soft reddish light over the binnacle. Their course was southwest. The glow then was to the northwest, perhaps a little north of northwest. He tried to visualize the map of the Chesapeake that he’d been studying the day before, then looked back at the spreading and intensifying glow.

Washington. There were no cities along the Chesapeake northwest of Crisfield. The first city northwest of Crisfield was way inland, was Washington. A hundred miles away.

A hundred miles away. Holy sweet Jesus. The light glowed more brightly. Frank staggered out of the wheelhouse.

Captain Olly was dozing in his faded and worn overstuffed chair, the television set gleaming in front of him, the sound turned down low, though still audible. Hours before his son had gone out to a Smith Island bar, but Olly had decided to stay home, bushed as usual.

The face of a newscaster was on the screen murmuring in tense, anxious tones, but Olly didn’t hear. Then, with a gentle popping sound, the screen went dark, and the lights Olly had left on behind the set and in the kitchen went out also.

Olly stirred and, awakened by the change, opened his eyes.

“Chris?” he said into the darkness.

He began feeling with his hands for the thin blanket Chris sometimes put over him when he’d fallen asleep in his chair and Chris didn’t want him to wake up. But his lap was bare. It didn’t feel like he’d been sleeping that long, but if Chris was home and had turned out all the lights it must be damn late.

He shuffled slowly to the bathroom and without bothering to turn on the light, pissed into the sink—no problem with aiming at such close range. Then he shuffled off to his small bedroom at the rear of the house. He hesitated for a moment at his bedroom door, a vague feeling of uneasiness nagging at him. In years at sea and in the bay he’d learned to be responsive to such intuitive hints of trouble, but he was in his own little house, anchored solidly to Smith Island, which was anchored less solidly in Chesapeake mud. It was the moonlight streaming in the bedroom window that bothered him, but he couldn’t tell why.

He was old, and he was tired. He fell onto his bed fully clothed and closed his eyes. Something was wrong, but damned if he could think of anything that wouldn’t wait till morning. Soon he was asleep in the empty house, the half-moon not yet risen in the east, but light streaming in his window from the northwest.

Jeanne was driving the station wagon through the darkness on Route 5 south toward Point Lookout, having already traveled more than forty of the seventy miles from Washington. Lisa was sitting silently beside her, Skippy sprawled asleep in the rear with the dog, when a brilliant flash of light filled the car, as if some enormous vehicle with its brights on had suddenly come up fast behind them. When Jeanne glanced in her rearview mirror, the brightness was more like a gigantic, diffuse searchlight on the horizon, aimed at her. Lisa turned to stare back out the rear window, and then, her face glimmering in the light, looked fearfully at Jeanne.

“What is it, Mother?” she asked.

Jeanne, following fifty yards behind a blue pickup truck, didn’t reply. The inexplicable and terrifying brightness had numbed her mind.

Then her car suddenly went out of control, picked up by an invisible hand and flung forward at ten or fifteen miles faster than she’d been going, the rear end swinging sickeningly to the left, then gliding back as if they’d hit a patch of ice. The pickup truck had swerved into the ditch on the right, then careened back across the highway into the other lane. Finally, wobbling as if all four tires had gone flat, it steadied in the center of the highway, with Jeanne following it, almost oblivious of what was happening to her own car. When the pickup’s brake lights glowed, she began to slow her wagon, both vehicles quickly reducing speed.

When Jeanne glanced at Lisa, she saw her daughter staring speechlessly at her in wide-eyed horror. Still not thinking, she slowed down, letting the pickup disappear ahead of her into the eerily lit night. When she saw a turnaround in front of a fruit stand, she pulled the car off the road and stopped.

“I’m trembling” was the first thought she had, and she gripped the steering wheel tighter, trying to control the incredible vibrations of her arms. Yes, trembling was what it was called, she thought stupidly.

“Oh, Mommy, Mommy, what’s happening?” Lisa cried, and Jeanne felt her daughter pressing against her, gripping her arm, her face against Jeanne’s shoulder. Jeanne raised her head to look back into the rearview mirror, which was still filled with light. She glanced to her left and watched two cars speed by, lit by the yellow glow from behind. Then she turned to look back: a light was ballooning outward and upward, the central brightness growing dimmer as more and more of the sky was lit up. Lisa’s fingers dug into her still-trembling arm, and Jeanne thought simply, “A nuclear bomb has hit Washington.” There was no conscious terror or fear, only the simple fact. “And this is what it’s like forty miles away.”

Two more cars sped past toward Point Lookout. No one was now heading back toward Washington. She closed her eyes and lowered her head to the wheel.

“Mommy… Mommy…” Lisa pleaded beside her, but Jeanne couldn’t seem to function, couldn’t seem to think anything. She had a sudden image of the house in Alexandria being shattered into tiny pieces by the blast, but she felt nothing. The wheel was cold against her forehead. From the backseat the dog barked twice nervously, apparently disturbed by the light.

Jeanne raised her head and sat up straight, staring forward. She turned the engine back on. She shifted into forward, swung the car in a U, and began to drive back toward Washington.

Beside her Lisa began to whimper.

“Where are we going, Mommy?” she gasped out between low moans.

Ahead of them a bell-shaped clump of light expanded into the sky, its upper rim rising but growing dimmer, the lower part spreading out horizontally and retaining its brightness. When the car headed straight toward it, Jeanne had trouble seeing the road. When an oncoming car honked its horn at her and she swerved to the right, her right wheels slid off the shoulder, skidded, then climbed back onto the road.

“Oh, Mommy, Mommy.”

How long it’s been since Lisa has called me Mommy, she thought, driving unthinkingly onward.

And then she saw a fire. Two cars tangled by the other side of the road, one of them engulfed in flames. She slowed down as she passed them and then after a minute stopped the car at the side of the road. From the slight rise, she could see ahead for miles, where several other small fires were burning in the half-darkness, whether cars or houses she couldn’t tell. Off to the right a whole village seemed to be burning. The landscape was otherwise obscure.

“You’re in shock. Get the children to safety. You’re in shock, get the children to safety, you’re in shock…” She was experiencing her mind as some alien machine functioning mechanically and improperly, while she herself was dumb, helpless.

“Mommy, let’s go the other way,” Lisa whispered against her shoulder.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she found herself saying calmly, her arm still trembling. “We’d better get down to Point Lookout.”

She swung the car a second time in a U, almost colliding with a van that was already speeding southward, which she had seen and yet not seen. Then she was in line with the other vehicles, speeding through the night away from Washington.

Neil ran down the dock and began casting off Vagabond, feeling vulnerable, naked. Leaving the Tangier bar, he’d seen the glow to the northwest and known what it meant, but had not broken stride toward the boat. As Jim leapt onto Vagabond and ran aft to descend into the inflatable dinghy that was tied off between the hulls Neil sensed that now that Jim’s nightmare had come true he was acting with unpanicked calm. With the wind still light out of the east Jim would have to tow them out to the bay before they could pick up a breeze. But even as Neil was making active preparations to get them to their rendezvous with Frank at Crisfield, a part of his mind was still focused on the problem of heading the boat south, out of the Chesapeake and onto the open sea.

When Jim came sliding between the hulls in the dinghy, Neil dropped him the towline. The glow to the northwest was brighter now, and a surge of panic forced Neil to steady himself, holding on to the forestay and staring at the glow on the horizon.

“Get going,” he said sharply to Jim and ran aft to raise the sails.

Five minutes later Vagabond was out of the cove and sailing northward behind her dinghy at almost four knots. Neil knew Frank might be on some late ferry to Tangier, so he was keeping his boat in the marked channel. As they moved forward he realized that there was not a single light showing on Tangier and Smith islands or the entire Eastern Shore. The battery-operated buoy lights were working, but the rest of the world was in darkness.

Some twenty minutes out into the bay he spotted the ferry closing on them fast and bearing away. He put the spreader lights on, so that Frank, if he was aboard, would be certain to recognize his trimaran. When he trained his glasses on the passengers, some of whom were visible in the ferry’s lights, he saw Frank standing on the stem waving his arms at them like a drowning man.

Neil signaled Jim to drop the towline and get over to the ferry. When he looked back through the binoculars he saw Frank standing on the ship’s side, a duffel bag in each hand; after staring dubiously at the widening gap between the ferry and Vagabond and then at the water, the tall gangly figure stepped awkwardly off the boat and disappeared into the blackness, the ferry speeding on to Tangier. While Neil watched—feeling both fear and admiration for Frank—it took Jim only a half-minute to reach Frank and another two to bring them both back to the trimaran. As Neil let Vagabond come up into the wind and rushed over to the port cockpit Frank tossed his two wet bags on deck and prepared to swing himself up.

“Thank God we found you,” Neil said, grabbing Frank’s hand to pull him aboard.

“There’s a war on, did you know?” Frank shot back.

“Yes,” Neil answered.

“You got a towel for me? I’m freezing to death.”

Neil carried the two duffel bags into the wheelhouse and found a towel Jim had left on a settee. As Frank began undressing and vigorously drying his body Neil went back to speak to Jim.

“Come back aboard,” Neil shouted to him. “We’ll tow the dinghy and sail.” As Jim began to obey, Neil went back to the wheel to get Vagabond turned around and headed down the bay toward the Atlantic Ocean.

“Where the hell are you going?” Frank asked, pausing in drying his legs to look up at Neil as he was winching in the mainsail.

“We’ve got to escape this madness,” Neil said, taking Vagabond off the wind on a starboard tack. “The Chesapeake will soon be nothing but a saltwater burial ground. The whole East Coast is probably doomed.”

Frank stared at him.

“We’ve been at war less than an hour,” he snapped back. “Are you surrendering already?”

The question startled Neil. He was ready to surrender in some sense, not to an invading army—that he’d be willing to fight—but to the invisible, anonymous destruction that he knew had been unleashed.

Jim had made the dinghy fast and now appeared in the wheel-house, watching their confrontation uncertainly.

“You may want to run immediately,” Frank went on angrily, “but I’ve got a wife and daughter thirty miles outside of New York City who may still be alive. I’ve got Jeannie and Bob to pick up.”

“The Foresters can’t have survived what happened to Washington,” Neil said.

“They may have come down to Point Lookout earlier this evening,” Frank explained. “In any case it’s damn certain it’s our job to go over and see.”

“All right,” said Neil. “But then we’ve got to get out into the Atlantic—before we’re blown up or buried in radioactive ash.”

“Don’t give me any more crap about an ocean voyage,” Frank shot back. “We’re at war! We have to stay here!”

“There may not be a here much longer,” Neil insisted.

“Neil’s right, dad,” Jim broke in. “We’ve got to get out of the Chesapeake.”

“Shut up! Both of you!” Frank shouted. He paced past Jim out into a side cockpit and then, after staring at the eerie ballooning glow on the horizon, returned.

“Even if New York’s already been hit, no one can be certain how wide the radius of destruction is around the cities.” He paused. “I’m going to try to fly north. I’ve got to get to Norah and Susan.”

Neil stared at him in disbelief.

“I figure there’s a chance they’re still alive,” Frank continued huskily. “I can charter a plane in Salisbury to fly to Oyster Bay and bring her back.”

Neil searched Frank’s anguished face.

“It’s madness, Frank,” he said softly. “That whole area has probably been hit. If your wife did survive, she’s already fled farther out the island. There’s no way—”

“I’m going,” Frank interrupted sharply. “If there’s only one chance in ten, I’ve still got to try.”

“And what are Jim and I supposed to do?” Neil asked, brushing roughly past Frank to adjust the mainsheet. “Sit here for two or three days waiting for the fallout or the next explosion?”

“You try to get the Foresters over at Point Lookout.”

“All right, we’ll do that,” Neil said. “But then what?”

“You pick me up in Crisfield tomorrow night.”

Neil grimaced and turned away, shaking his head.

“We’ll sail to Crisfield now,” Frank went on, “and I can get to Salisbury by eight or nine in the morning.” Both he and Neil watched Vagabond sail past a red buoy, both instinctively noting the ship’s speed. “I should be able to get a plane by ten or eleven. New York by noon. If I give myself six hours to find her and Susan, that’ll get me back at Crisfield by… nine tomorrow.”

Neil stared at him for a moment.

“Look, Frank,” he began, glancing at Jim, who was listening with grim attentiveness. “Not many people are going to survive what’s happening. The ones who do are going to have to act fast and… ruthlessly. They’ll have to know enough to cut their losses and run. Don’t go. We can go over to Point Lookout to check for the Foresters now and then ride the tide down out the bay later tomorrow morning.”

Frank flushed.

“I’m going,” he said. “And you’re not using my boat to escape your responsibilities.”

“What responsibilities!” Neil exploded. “Tell me what in God’s name you think any of us can do now against incoming missiles except try to survive. Every second you delay us you’re risking my life and your son’s and the Foresters’.”

“I have to try to save my family,” Frank went on. “We can’t just run.”

“We can’t help anyone dead,” Jim blurted out.

“Jim’s right,” Neil said.

Frank leaned against the wheelhouse shelf, put his face in his hands, and rubbed his forehead. When he looked up, much of his color seemed to have drained away.

“I’m going to try,” he.said softly. “Get Vagabond turned around. If I’m not back by nine tomorrow night… by ten… that’s when the tide’s high… you can leave without me.”

As Neil stared forward past the mainmast and across the water he felt resentment at the way Frank had cast him in the villain’s role. During the last crisis, three months before, he’d considered what he would do if a nuclear war broke out and had decided he’d probably have it easy, because he’d be on a boat at sea or on the coast and thus could flee the explosions and fallout. But the holocaust had actually found him becalmed without an engine seventy-five miles up a bay in the middle of dozens of prime targets, with his passengers scattered to the winds. Frank’s insane scheme of searching for his family up north had complicated things further. Every moment they remained in the Chesapeake decreased their chances of survival.

“Don’t go, dad,” Jim said after a long silence. “Please don’t go. We can’t help mom now.”

“I’ve got to go,” Frank replied, turning to walk out into the port cockpit. “I could never forgive myself if… I didn’t try…”

Neil turned the wheel over to Jim, told him to bring Vagabond about, and walked after Frank.

“All right,” he said when he had caught up to him, looking into Frank’s frightened, determined face. “If you’ve got to go, so be it. We’ll take you to Crisfield and then go to Point Lookout to try to help the Foresters, then back into Crisfield tomorrow.”

“And you can leave without me at ten,” Frank concluded.

“I plan to sail south at no later than ten tomorrow night,” Neil agreed impassively.

Frank nodded gloomily. As Vagabond swung about to take Frank back to Crisfield they all stared forward at the terrifying glow on the horizon. On every other side the world was dark.

“Be back on time, you fool,” Neil said softly to Frank. “We need you.”

“Yeah,” said Frank huskily. “I can’t let you steal my boat.”

By the time Jeanne was within a few miles of Point Lookout she was out of her state of shock. Point Lookout, she knew, was a dead end: a small town at the end of the huge V-shaped peninsula bordered on one side by the wide Potomac River and on the other by the Chesapeake. The nearest bridges were almost fifty miles away and might have been destroyed by the airburst over Washington. She would meet Vagabond in Point Lookout or have to get herself and the children onto another boat. Hundreds, thousands of survivors from the destruction to the north would be tunneled south to this tiny town, and everyone would be looking for a boat.

She knew that Vagabond might not come for her, that Frank might have concluded that she and her family had been killed. She could only hope the trimaran was already in Point Lookout and would wait a few hours at least.

Lisa too had regained control. She seemed to need to talk, so Jeanne nodded and grunted while her own mind worked along in its own channels. Mostly Lisa recited what she could remember from reading their pamphlets about radioactive fallout, a subject Jeanne already knew well. Neither of them mentioned her father, dead, Jeanne assumed dully, in Washington. Her strongest emotion when she emerged from shock was anger: anger at the Russians and Americans who had created this war that had killed Bob and was threatening to kill Lisa and Skip.

As they neared Point Lookout it struck Jeanne as strange that she could see other drivers, like herself reacting to the largest crisis of their lives, yet say nothing to them. Each vehicle was its own separate island, its occupants shipwrecked alone.

And something else was strange: there didn’t seem to be anyone at home along the road. The area was deserted. Then she realized: there was no electric power. The lights were out. Forever.

The word forever chilled her even as she recognized it as melodrama; she shook her head to get rid of it. But she felt her anger rising again at the sight of the dark houses on either side of the road, as if already everyone inside them were dead. The stupid, thoughtless life-haters were doing it: they were blowing up the world.

When she entered the village of Point Lookout, it too was dark. By the time she arrived at the waterfront, it was a little after eleven. The only light came from the cars and the glow to the northwest.

She drove past a place called Kelly’s Marina, but turned in when she saw a sign saying Municipal Marina.

The parking lot was not crowded, and she chose a spot off at the end next to a small saltwater creek and parked. For a moment she sat there staring down at the barely visible black waters of the creek and ignoring Lisa’s question—“What are we going to do now?” Then, after watching someone running through the yard carrying a kerosene lantern, she turned to her daughter.

“I want you to stay here with Skippy,” she said quietly. “Lock the car doors. Don’t let anyone in. I’m going to see if Frank is here yet.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“If he’s not here,” she went on, “we’ll have to wait. Maybe we’ll go to the motel or perhaps we’ll stay here. But you stay here no matter how long it takes me to get back.”

“I will, Mother,” Lisa answered. “You be careful.”

When Jeanne leaned over to give Lisa a kiss, she found herself being hugged by Lisa’s long arms.

“It’s going to be all right, honey,” she said softly as she loosened herself from the embrace. “The bastards haven’t killed us yet.”

After she got out of the car, Jeanne waited until Lisa had locked the doors and then hurried through the parking lot toward the docks. In the darkness she noticed clusters of people gathered quietly in the lot and along the dock. She felt alone and vulnerable, then frightened whenever a car’s headlights swept over her like a memory of the nuclear blast. She knew what a trimaran looked like—thank God Frank had such a strange-looking boat—but in the darkness it was difficult to tell if three hulls together belonged to three separate boats or one large trimaran. Several boats were lit up, and most people hurrying along the waterfront had flashlights.

How she wished she could talk to someone. There was a war, a war, and everyone just hurried past, ignoring her.

The dock was a giant T, but after searching along both its arms, she had not found Vagabond. Finally she stopped someone hurrying toward the shore.

“Excuse me, do you know if there’s a trimaran—”

“Can’t help you, lady,” the man replied, not even slowing his pace.

Closing her eyes, Jeanne moved over to a piling and held on to it to steady herself. She noticed several boats riding at anchor that were barely visible from the dock, and she wondered if Vagabond was among them. She could feel her arms trembling again and thought of Skippy and Lisa in the car, depending on her.

Okay. Eleven twenty and the trimaran’s not at the municipal dock. It might not get here until dawn. She’d check with the dockmaster and the motel desk for messages; she’d take a look at any other marinas here in the heart of town; and then all she could do was wait.

There was no dockmaster on duty, and when she finally got someone to listen to her, he said he didn’t know anything about any trimaran. She returned wearily to her car.

Lisa, wide-eyed, lowered the window on the passenger’s side.

“Frank’s not here yet,” Jeanne said with exaggerated nonchalance. “He may not arrive until dawn. I’m going to check the motel down the street to see if maybe he got a message through to us before… I’ll be gone another half-hour,” she concluded. “Why don’t you climb in back beside Skippy and try to get some sleep.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“You need some rest.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye out for Frank.”

Jeanne examined her frightened, eager-eyed daughter.

“I’ll be back,” she said, and walked away.

In the darkness the motel was difficult to locate. Lit only by the glow from the northwest, the place seemed like a deserted set for some horror film, the main street like a path through a dark canyon.

There was no message at the motel, and they had no room reserved for her, having given it to some “personal friends.” Sorry.

She searched Porter’s and Kelly’s and then the municipal docks again, but there was no trimaran. As she returned to her car she realized that in an hour and a half she hadn’t heard a friendly word.

Lisa was still in the front seat, slumped to one side, asleep. When Jeanne unlocked the driver’s door, she stirred but slept on. Jeanne decided that she herself should sleep. If Frank arrived now, he’d certainly wait until morning before leaving again. She relocked the driver’s door and climbed over the seat to settle down on the sleeping bag beside Skippy and Banjo. After pulling the light blanket up over herself and Skip, she stared up at the dark ceiling of her station wagon. A strong sense of unreality flowed through her. Was she really lying in her car three hours after the start of a nuclear war? The warm softness of Skippy’s body beside her seemed so human, so nice, so reassuring. She lifted her head to look out the window: figures with lanterns and flashlights were moving in the darkness along the dock. Someone shouted. The war was real.

After a while she slept. She was awakened once in the night by a scream, but when she sat up saw nothing. There was only one light moving in the darkness. Near dawn she was awakened again by someone shaking her foot and then pulling her bodily out the back of the station wagon. When she sat up, she banged her head on the car roof and, wide awake now, saw two men, one of whom had hold of her feet and was dragging her out the back of her own car. Banjo was growling.

“Stop it!” she shouted, but the man dragged her up to the rear door and then took hold of her arm and pulled her roughly out.

“Give us the car keys,” he said, his fingers digging into her upper arm, his face, tensely expressionless in the early predawn light, only a foot away from hers. Fully alert, but still groping for reality, she looked speechlessly back at him.

“Yes… yes, of course,” she finally said. “But let us get our stuff out.”

When she tried to turn back to the car, the man held her fast.

“I found them,” she heard the other man say, and saw he had her handbag and now the keys.

The first man flung her off to the side, sending her stumbling over the small embankment, and down onto her face, rolling toward the shallow creek. The cold water struck her legs like a slap.

“Let’s go,” she heard a voice say.

Vagabond was moving toward Point Lookout with agonizing slowness. The nightmare of the war was compounded for Neil by the more personal and immediate nightmare of running in place, being unable to move forward no matter how hard he tried. It had seemed like an endless crawl toward Crisfield with Frank in the wee hours of the morning, and since they had put him ashore just before dawn an endless crawl in light winds across the bay.

And as they struggled the horror of the unfolding nuclear destruction was becoming more real. At the dock in Crisfield Frank had tried to telephone his wife and reported back dully to Neil and Jim:

“The operator didn’t even try. She said—the operator said… ‘I’m sorry, sir, New York State has been disconnected.’” He laughed joylessly.

They had all listened in the darkness to the transistor radio, and on the entire AM dial they were able to bring in only five stations where normally there would have been forty or so. Dribs and drabs of hurried, sometimes barely coherent news drifted out. It often took the reporters several repetitions of each frightening report before a piece of grim news could be accepted as confirmed and indisputable. The idea that Washington and New York and apparently fifty to a hundred other places had been destroyed and that twenty to eighty million people had already been killed, that almost all major radio and television stations were not operating, and that the war was continuing: all this was almost beyond their ability to cope. It seemed to be beyond some of the announcers’ abilities to cope as well. A few read the news items as if they were reading a weather report and made it seem so absurd that at one point Frank giggled. Others would become emotional and eventually be replaced by a more controlled voice.

One commentator pointed out that there was no way of knowing how many nuclear warheads had hit a given target, whether the target had been struck directly or peripherally, and whether the explosion had occurred on the ground or in the air. Knowledge that a place had been hit at all usually could only be deduced from its total silence. There were few eyewitness reports.

All United States military personnel had been ordered to report for duty. If it was “no longer feasible” for reservists to make contact with their units, they were ordered to report to the nearest “base of the appropriate service.”

The President issued a statement at four thirty a.m. indicating that he and all cabinet members were safe, but that dozens, perhaps hundreds of U.S. Congressmen had been killed by the blasts over Washington and other major cities. Offensive action had been commenced against the Soviet Union; nuclear war was being waged in Europe and Asia too. Although at least twenty major American cities had already been reported hit and twice that many missile installations and other military targets, the implication was that for some unstated reason the Russians hadn’t unleashed as devastating an attack as might have been expected. To Neil it meant only that worse might be yet to come. One exchange between two announcers on the Norfolk radio station particularly depressed and frightened him.

“Is there anything new from the national news wire, Herb?” a man’s voice asked shakily.

“There’s still no contact with NBC news in New York, John. All we’ve got, actually, are the items we’re picking up from WTUV in Richmond, but they seem to have a direct connection with the federal government.”

“What about WBZE here in Norfolk? Do they have access to the ABC news wire?”

“No. All three network news services are out.”

“What about the West Coast centers?”

“Los Angeles and San Francisco were both hit, John. There’s just no contact—”

“What about military targets here in the Norfolk area?”

“The mayor has ordered the evacuation of all nonessential personnel,” the other voice replied. “I’m afraid that with the U.S. naval base here and the shipyards in Portsmouth, this would appear to be a prime target area…”

Neil knew that if Norfolk, at the mouth of the Chesapeake, were hit, they might never escape to the open sea.

By the time they were away from Crisfield and on their way to Point Lookout the net effect on Neil of listening to the frenzied preliminary reports of destruction had been to produce a strange and unexpected emotion that, he realized after a moment, was shame. He felt like a child whose classmates had run amok: although he wasn’t personally involved, the destruction was somehow his responsibility.

Yet the dawn and early morning hours apparently belied the reports they were hearing. A third of the way across the bay the day was clear; the sun shone brightly on the still water. A mile away Smith and Tangier islands lay lush and green and silent like some bucolic Utopia. Land and houses on the now receding Eastern Shore lay gleaming with postcard clarity. There even seemed to be an oysterman up and working the beds to the southeast. It was as if the radio reports had been an Orson Welles prank.

But to the northwest the nightmare was very much in evidence: a huge gray cloud had spread over half the horizon, a shapeless mass whose lower reaches were quite dark, its upper borders, high overhead now, diffuse and ill defined. A second area of cloudiness to the northeast was merging with it. Philadelphia? Only from the east through south to due west was the sky still clear. Norfolk still lived.

By eight a.m. the breeze began to pick up, and Neil felt that if it held or freshened further, they would make Point Lookout by ten thirty.

As their progress became routine and they stopped listening to the radio Neil was saddened that he felt no desire to try to rush northward to anyone’s rescue. When he imagined his parents struggling to survive after an explosion over Boston and the devastation of their home town of Ocean Bluff, he felt depressed and vaguely ashamed, but the idea that he could get there and become a rescuer simply had no reality. Frank’s plan seemed insane. For Neil it was as if the war had created a new world, one that ended all previous relationships. Your family would now be defined as whoever you found yourself with. And the new world, for Neil, would survive only if they could make, it out to sea.

“What do you know about nuclear fallout?” Jim asked from beside him, interrupting his thoughts.

“Enough,” Neil replied.

“That stuff we see ahead of us is radioactive fallout,” Jim said. He looked at Neil as if searching to see how horrible this fact really was. The gray cloud cover to the northwest was more pronounced now that the sun was higher in the sky. It also seemed to be spreading slightly toward them.

“Yes,” said Neil. “I expect it is.”

“It’s going to spread,” Jim said.

“Yes,” Neil replied quietly. “But we’re almost a hundred miles away.”

“We won’t be at Point Lookout,” Jim replied. “And even so, I think it’s gotten closer since the sun came up.”

Neil squinted at it, as if noting this fact for the first time.

“Maybe,” he said. “But this northeast wind is helping us. It’s moving the stuff away at right angles.”

“You told me earlier you thought the wind will be shifting to the north,” Jim persisted.

Neil went out into the port cockpit to adjust the genny sheet and then returned to the wheel.

“We do what we must do, Jim,” he said. “Right now we’re sailing Vagabond to Point Lookout.”

“And when that stuff starts falling on deck?” Jim asked, still searching Neil’s face for any sign of fear.

Neil looked back at him neutrally.

“Then we sweep it off,” he replied.

Jeanne and Lisa, with Skippy and the dog huddled around them, blinked in bewilderment at the chaos that was now the waterfront of Point Lookout. Two hours after they’d been thrown out of the station wagon, there were several hundred people where the night before there had been perhaps two dozen. In places along the docks and on the wooden picnic tables a thin layer of ash had been discovered at dawn, a discovery that had increased the panic. Jeanne had already seen people siphoning gasoline from parked cars for boat engines or their own cars, seen men rush past with guns stuffed in their belts, rifles in their hands. People milled along the dock, pleading with anyone on board a boat to take them along, the women sometimes weeping, the children silent. She had seen five or six people with burned faces and arms and two people being carried on makeshift stretchers. One of the cars that had driven into the parking lot had most of its red paint blistered.

One by one over the two hours since she’d been up searching for Vagabond, vessels had motored away from the dock area, a few completely packed and low in the water, others with only two or three people aboard. Some were motor yachts, some sailboats; most were open boats with inboard and outboard engines. All wanted to get away from Washington and the fallout.

Although many boats had already left, the waterfront was still crowded. Several of those that had been at anchor were now coming in to get fuel or to pick up passengers. Others were arriving from down the Potomac.

Jeanne had recovered from the shock of being thrown out of her car. The men had let Lisa and Skippy leave and had tossed out the children’s duffel bags, her larger suitcase, and a sleeping bag, but had driven off with her smaller suitcase, her handbag, and a lot of little stuff in the car, including snack food she’d tossed together. She had no money or credit cards, and they hadn’t eaten breakfast. When she’d rolled into the creek, she’d wet her jeans through, so had changed into white shorts and blouse; her wet boat shoes she’d had to leave on, since her other shoes were in the missing smaller suitcase.

As she stood with one arm around Lisa’s waist and the other holding Skippy’s hand, she was tremblingly considering other options. With every minute that passed the chances of the trimaran’s arriving at Point Lookout grew smaller. She could conceive of no reason for Frank not to have arrived by now. He’d said he hoped to come at ten last night, early morning at the latest. What could possibly stop him from motoring across the bay? Her only conclusion was that Frank had decided that she and her family were dead. He wasn’t coming.

So what could she do? She had no husband, no home, no car, no money, no friends, and no place to stay. Her isolation and powerlessness saddened and angered her. The burned faces, sightless eyes, and the shuffling, numb way so many people moved frightened her. She had to focus on her alternatives, but when she did she could see only one: she should try to get across the bay to Crisfield. Frank would probably not be there, but it seemed like her only hope. At least they would keep moving. She should try to hitch a ride on some other boat.

Even as she decided, she could feel herself absorbing the alternating numbness and hysteria she saw all around her. The people on shore were becoming more numerous and the remaining boats fewer. Two fistfights had broken out at the gas dock, and just after ten a man had been shot. The absence of electric power had forced the marina to develop some sort of mechanical siphoning system and the dockmaster’s efforts to ration the amount of fuel he pumped seemed to have provoked the shooting. Within two minutes of the gunshot everyone seemed to have forgotten about it. The wounded man had staggered off alone. There were no policemen.

When she went in search of a boat owner who might be willing to take her and her family across the bay, she left Lisa by the marina office to take care of Skippy and their two bags and went out on the docks alone. The stretch of dock next to each remaining boat was thronged with men and women either dully or passionately begging for a chance to get on board. Clustered around the first boat were two families, two stony-faced mothers, their children cowering big-eyed around their legs, the husbands, angry, holding out money. She didn’t see any sense in competing, so she moved on.

The second boat was a twenty-five-foot motor yacht with two men working on its engine. One of them looked up at the group accosting him from the dock. She saw the man stare appraisingly at an attractive blond woman who was pleading with him to take her and her child, and then his gaze shifted to Jeanne herself, first her bare legs, and then her breasts, and finally her eyes. She felt a sensual shock: from fifteen feet away and without uttering a word the man seemed to have propositioned her.

She hurried on. The third boat was filled to overflowing, but as she passed it she had the feeling that these people had boarded an empty boat and that no one really knew what was going on. She was walking back from the end of one of the arms of the T, when a slender young man about thirty came up and stopped her.

“Are you looking for a boat?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied eagerly. “I want to get across the bay to Crisfield.”

“1 might be able to help you.”

“Thank God. I’ve got two children too. Where’s your boat?”

“Two children?” the man said, frowning. “We’ve only got room for one more person.”

“They’re only children…” Jeanne pleaded. “They won’t take up much…”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, we’re just too full.”

When he brushed nervously past her and hurried away, she stared after him in shock.

“You bastard!” she shouted at his retreating back.

As she headed back down the docks toward the marina office she realized how vulnerable she was, especially with two children. No one wanted that additional responsibility. Lisa and Skippy were still where she’d left them, hot and hungry. Lisa had fished a half-eaten banana out of a trash can, and Skippy, after first accusing it of being dirty, had finally eaten it. She grabbed Skippy’s hand, and they traipsed like the war refugees they were down the fifty feet of road to the entrance to Kelly’s, but seeing that Porter’s Boatyard seemed much less crowded, she decided to try there first.

At the gate two men with shotguns greeted her.

“Can we help you, ma’am?” one of them asked.

“Yes, I hope so,” Jeanne replied, thankful for the first sign of politeness she’d encountered all day. “I…1 need to get a boat ride across the bay.”

“Do you know anyone in here?” the man asked.

“No.”

“Our orders are that no one is permitted to enter the yard unless they’re friends or guests of owners of one of the boats here. I’m sorry.”

“Oh.”

She hurried back to Kelly’s Marina, which was slightly less crowded than the town docks, but the situation was the same: boat owners nervously preparing their boats, refugees looking for rides. She paused in the yard before going out. She had nothing to offer that the others didn’t have, but she had to try.

“Lisa,” she said to her daughter at her side. “I want you to keep yourself and Skippy thirty or forty feet behind me and out of sight. Follow me, watch me, don’t lose me, but stay away until I call you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mother,” Lisa replied. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m trying to get us a ride across the bay, where I hope to find Frank.”

Jeanne had noticed a sailboat tied a little way off a small dock between the municipal marina and Kelly’s, and now that a family of four was leaving, there was only one man on the nearby dock.

“Do you have a hairbrush?” she asked her daughter. “Mine was in my handbag.”

“I think so.”

Lisa dug out her hairbrush from the duffel bag, and Jeanne let down her hair, which she had tied back earlier, and brushed it out. She had no fresh makeup on, but hoped she didn’t need it.

“How do I look?” she asked Lisa.

Lisa stared at her uncertainly.

“You… you look fine,” she answered.

“I mean my mascara’s not running…”

“No… Mother, what are you going to do? Let me come with you.”

“No, honey, stay here,” she replied and walked away.

She moved without haste and without the sense of desperation that, she realized now, had been with her all that morning. It was still with her, of course, but since she was playing a part, her desperation was under control. She was trying to walk like a beautiful woman out for a stroll on a lovely summer morning. A wave of horror at the image surged through her. She felt ridiculous. She kept walking.

She saw that the man on the dock was adjusting a line that ran out to the sailboat, twenty feet off the dock, where two other men were working hurriedly. They looked like they were about to leave port.

“Hi,” she said as the man watched her approach down the gentle embankment that led to the dock.

“Hello,” he said, glancing at her nervously. He was a muscular-looking man in his mid-twenties, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt.

“I could use a boat ride,” she said.

“You and half the rest of the world,” the man answered, his eyes flicking quickly over her, his expression neutral.

She tried to smile.

“There are a lot of us,” she agreed.

“What’s she want?” an older man called from the boat.

“Says she wants a boat ride,” the first man answered.

When she turned to the sailboat, she saw that the two men had stopped whatever they were doing and were staring at her. There was no friendliness in their faces, only appraisal.

“I’d like to get a ride over to Crisfield,” she said, still smiling.

The older man, in his forties she guessed, gray-haired, wearing glasses, looked her up and down. “Can you cook?” he asked.

“Cook?” Jeanne echoed, then nodded. On a twenty-mile voyage?

“Come aboard then,” he said.

Jeanne hesitated.

“Are you going to Crisfield?”

“We haven’t decided,” the man answered, still staring at her without smiling. “If you want to come, come. We’re leaving.”

She slowly let her eyes drift to her left and then attentively off to her right. Lisa was sitting on the grass fifty feet away, feeding Skippy something while watching Jeanne.

“I hope to find a friend on a big trimaran in Crisfield,” she explained to the man on the boat.

The two men in the cockpit whispered together urgently. The other was a round, heavyset man in his twenties with a full black beard.

“We’ve got work to do. Come aboard, and let’s talk about it,” the older man repeated. “Pull us up to the dock, Gary.”

The man next to her pulled on a line, and the stern of the sailboat eased toward the dock. The bearded man came around to the transom of the sailboat to help her down.

She hesitated, half of her wanting to run, the other half knowing that this was probably her last chance to get a ride across the bay to find Frank. Then she felt the hands of the man on the dock take hold of her waist from behind.

“Ready?” he said.

“What?” she replied.

But he lifted her up and held her out toward the big man in the stern, who grabbed her under the armpits and slowly lowered her onto the deck, grinning in her face.

“Welcome aboard,” he said, “I’m Carl.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at him uncertainly. She turned to the older man.

“I… I need a ride to Crisfield,” she said again, feeling stupid.

“Come down below and have a drink,” he said. “Carl, warm the engine up.”

Again she wanted to run, but the children were safe and… she had to get them to Frank. After a five-second hesitation, she smiled again.

“Thank you,” she said. She moved past him to the hatchway and then down the steps. The two men followed her.

Inside was a pleasant galley and dinette area on one side and a long settee on the other. She sat down on the settee. The older man stopped to pour out three glasses of bourbon while Carl got the key and went back up on deck to start the engine. The older man handed her a small glass.

“Here’s to survival,” he said.

“To survival,” she replied, and they clinked glasses.

“You can come,” he said to her. “We can use a female aboard the boat.”

“I just want to go across the bay,” she said.

“What if you don’t find your friend?” the man countered. “Then what are your plans?”

“Then I guess I’m open to… suggestions,” she replied slowly. “My husband’s dead and my chil—”

“If you sail with us,” the man said, “you’d be expected to cook for us, clean up, and perform… all the duties a woman usually… performs.”

“If… if I don’t find Frank… then that… will be fine.”

“She’ll cook for all of us,” Carl said to the older man as he returned to the cabin. “And perform all her duties for all of us. Agreed?”

The man looked at Carl coldly but nodded.

“You understand?” he asked Jeanne.

“Yes,” she said after a pause. “But if… if my friend is in Crisfield?”

“We’ll leave you with your friend.”

“Oh,” she said, relief flooding through her. “It sounds fair enough.”

“Good,” the man said. “Let’s see how good a cook you’re going to be.”

“I beg pardon?”

The man put his glass down on the dinette table and came up close to her, still not smiling. He reached down with large hands and cupped her breasts, squeezed them, then ran each thumb and index finger along until he was first squeezing and then rolling her nipples through her T-shirt and bra.

“You should be an incredible cook,” he said, flushed and grinning awkwardly.

Jeanne suppressed the desire to try to free herself and simply leaned back against the cushion of the settee, her arms folded in front of her.

“Yes, I can be,” she said steadily as the man let his hands fall away but kept standing in front of her and grinning. “But there’s one other clause in the agreement,” she went on.

“What’s that?”

“You also have to bring my two children.”

The older man frowned. “Children?” he said. “Who said anything about children?”

“I just did,” Jeanne answered. “If they don’t go, I don’t go.”

“We can’t take kids, ” Carl said sharply.

“Survival, my dear young woman,” the older man said, stepping back and finishing his drink. “We’re low on food as it is.”

“Take it or leave it,” Jeanne answered firmly, now hoping just to get off the boat. “Three of us or none. And a dog.”

“Your kids will be safer on shore,” the man said. “If they come with us, we might end up having to throw them overboard.”

“Or we might have to eat them,” Carl said. “We only want to eat you.”

Carl laughed, and the older man again smiled awkwardly.

“Just take us to Crisfield then,” Jeanne persisted.

“No, honey,” the older man said. “A cook like you—”

“Then I’m leaving,” said Jeanne, and she stood up and began walking toward the steps, but Carl grabbed her by the arm.

“How about it, Ned?” he said to his friend. “Shall we cast off?”

The older man looked at Jeanne, swallowed, then looked away.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell Gary to untie the mooring lines, come aboard, and haul in the anchor.”

“Let me go,” said Jeanne, struggling.

“Take it easy, honey,” Carl said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

She hit him in the face with her right hand and pulled away, but he simply grabbed her with both arms in a bear hug and held her close. He grinned down at her.

With all her strength Jeanne screamed for help.

It was ten twenty when Neil and Jim brought Vagabond in close to the municipal dock at Point Lookout. Earlier they’d noticed many boats on the water, especially coming down the Potomac. Two vessels had been close to foundering because of the masses of people aboard, but these sights hadn’t prepared them for the hysteria and chaos they now encountered at the docks.

“Bring her around into the wind, Jim,” Neil ordered from the port cockpit. He’d already lowered the mizzen and genoa and was sailing now with just the main. “We’re going to anchor off. Swing her! Swing her!”

As Jim finally brought the boat around into the wind thirty yards from the dock Neil rushed forward and threw out the thirty-five-pound CQR anchor.

“Drop the mainsail!” he shouted back, and Jim rushed out of the wheelhouse.

When they had the sail secured and the anchor well hooked, Vagabond’s stern lay only about twenty-five feet from one end of the T formed by the main dock.

“What do we do now?” Jim asked, looking with amazement at the scene before them. Already a dozen people had rushed down to their end of the dock and were shouting at them.

“Go get your .22,” Neil replied coldly. While Jim went below to get his rifle Neil considered the situation. He’d already decided during the sail over that if the Foresters didn’t appear immediately— Vagabond would be easy to spot, even in this chaos—then he would make one quick sweep around the docks and after thirty minutes get the hell back to Crisfield. Seeing the anarchy ashore made him question whether he should risk even a brief sortie off the boat. Certainly he would wait half an hour, but was there any sense in going ashore?

Jim emerged beside him with the .22.

“Is it loaded?” Neil asked.

“No.”

“Load it.”

While Jim loaded the .22—in full view of the crowd on the dock, Neil noted with satisfaction—Neil wondered whether he could risk sending Jim ashore. It was important to him to get more food aboard, and that he couldn’t expect Jim to handle. Whether there would be any chance to buy, barter, or steal any food he didn’t know, but it was worth a trip into town to find out.

“I’m going ashore,” he said to Jim.

“But do you know what the Foresters all look like?” Jim asked.

“Frank showed me photographs,” Neil replied quickly. “I want you to… I want you to shorten the anchor line twenty feet so we’ll be farther away from the dock. Don’t let anyone aboard.”

“Aren’t we going to help some of these people?” Jim asked.

“Yes,” Neil answered, still staring at the crowd, whose numbers were still growing. “But not until we know how many of our own people we’ll be sailing with.”

“Okay,” said Jim. “But what do I do if someone tries to board us? I can’t shoot them.”

“No, I guess not,” he said after a pause. “Try to keep them off with bluff. If you can’t, I’ll be back and we’ll take it from there.”

Neil climbed down into the dinghy and had Jim pay out the line so he would be blown slowly down onto the dock by the wind. When he was less than ten feet away, he stood up in the dinghy and shouted for silence from the crowd.

“I’m coming ashore,” he announced loudly. “In half an hour we’re sailing across the bay to Crisfield. At that time we’ll take passengers who want to get to Crisfield. Until then you all wait on the dock. Do you understand?”

A few nodded eagerly as if they were anxious to please; others started shouting. Neil ignored them all, signaled to Jim to pay out ten more feet of line, and soon pulled himself up onto the dock. Steadfastly ignoring the people pressing in around him, he watched Jim pull the empty dinghy back toward Vagabond. Then he began pushing his way through the crowd to get to land. He looked closely at the clusters of refugees along the docks, searching for the Foresters, hoping that they had seen Vagabond sail in and would be here on the dock. But they weren’t. If they were alive and in Point Lookout, they would have to be at another marina or else somewhere away from the waterfront for some reason. He couldn’t imagine what such a reason might be.

When he reached the marina office, he went in and questioned a harried and frightened teenager, the only one there, who knew nothing about anyone looking for a trimaran. Outside, Neil looked toward the two marinas to the north but decided he’d go into town first to check there and see if he could buy some supplies.

He had started toward the street, automatically looking at everyone in sight, when he saw a figure running along the street shouting for help, a girl, a young girl. Trying to catch what she was screaming, Neil abruptly realized that she looked something like the picture he’d seen of Lisa. She ran past him and turned into the entrance of the municipal marina, still running and now moving away from him.

“Lisa!” he shouted.

The girl stopped and looked around. It must be her.

“Lisa Forester!” he shouted and ran over to her.

“Who… who are you?” she asked.

“Neil Loken, Frank Stoor’s captain,” he answered quickly. “I’ve come—”

“Come quick!” Lisa cried. “I think they’re kidnapping my mother!”

“What!?”

“Some men took my mother on their boat, and I heard her scream and they’re leaving!”

“Show me,” said Neil.

Lisa began running back along the street with Neil running beside her.

“There!” she shouted, without slowing her pace, and she pointed at a long, low yawl that was slipping away from a nearby dock. “She’s on that boat.”

“You’re sure?” Neil asked, looking into the young stranger’s eyes.

“Yes! Yes! Please save her!”

Neil ran down the embankment and out onto the dock, and in one motion dove into the water. A part of him felt uncertain and ridiculous, but it was no time for second thoughts. Where was Lisa’s father?

As he surfaced after his first six strokes he realized that the yawl was easing up over its anchor and he was gaining on it quickly. There was one man in the cockpit and another handling the anchor line. They didn’t seem to notice him.

In another twenty strokes he was even with the vessel’s raked stern and, grabbing a cleat, he hauled himself up over the transom and onto the afterdeck. When he stood up, the man in the cockpit, a man in his forties, caught sight of him.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

Neil walked forward, stepped down into the cockpit, smiled at the man, and walked down into the cabin. A big bearded man was standing in the galley way with his back to Neil, and beyond him was a woman, barely visible past the man’s bulk. Carl swung around when he heard Neil, and the two men confronted each other.

“Excuse me,” Neil said and walked past Carl. The woman, crouching at the far end of the cabin, had a butcher knife in her hand. It was Jeanne Forester. He was startled by the sudden impact of her tensed animal beauty, accentuated by her gleaming wide dark eyes and the long black hair falling wildly across one side of her face.

“Hey, Ned!” Carl shouted up to the cockpit. “Who is this guy?”

“Hand me up the gun!” Ned shouted back.

Neil had stopped three feet from Jeanne. What a beautiful woman, he was still thinking irrelevantly.

“Can you swim?” he asked her softly.

“What?” she said back. “Who are you?”

As Neil started forward again she raised the knife, but he picked her up in his arms. She brought the knife down and held its point against his chest and stared at him. With her eyes only inches from his and the knifepoint pricking his skin, Neil felt a strong sexual surge pass through him.

“Can you swim?” he asked her softly.

“Yes,” she answered, still holding the knife tight against his chest, her eyes searching his.

Neil swung around and began to leave just as Carl handed a gun up to Ned in the cockpit. Neil again brushed past Carl, climbed the stairs, went out into the cockpit, walked up to and past the man with the gun, and in one unbroken motion threw Jeanne out into the water. She landed with an undignified splash, but began immediately swimming for shore.

“What the hell?” the older man said, rushing up beside Neil and looking down at Jeanne.

Neil hit him a crushing blow to the side of the head that sent him sprawling against the cockpit seat, the gun clattering to the deck. Neil picked it up and glanced back. The big bearded man had been about to spring forward but stood frozen now in a crouch. Neil stuffed the gun firmly into his belt and dove overboard.

He swam the first thirty feet underwater, and when he surfaced, he looked back to see if the men on the yawl had any other weapons, but they had already resumed their preparations to put to sea. Neil began swimming after Jeanne.

He came up to her where she was resting with her two slender hands grasping the edge of a small boat dock at Kelly’s, her head bowed, her wet black hair clinging in strands down her back. When she turned to him, she looked puzzled.

“Are you Neil Loken?” she asked.

“Yes, I—”

“Are you really Neil?” she persisted, suddenly smiling and crying all at once. “Thank God. Is Frank here? The boat? I couldn’t find it. We waited and waited. I was trying to get—”

“It’s okay,” he interrupted, reaching out with his free hand and touching her shoulder. “Lit me help you up onto the dock.”

“At first I thought you were another member of their crew,” she went on, still crying and laughing at the same time. “When you asked, ‘Can you swim?’ I thought…” She shook her head. “How did you find me?” she asked next, pulling her head back and smiling up at him, tears mingling with the salt water on her face.

“Lisa found me,” Neil answered.

“Oh, my God, where are Lisa and Skip?”

When Neil pointed to Lisa, who was standing on the dock watching them, she began trying to pull herself up onto the edge of the dock. Neil spread his right hand across her buttocks and lifted her up; she sprawled forward onto the dock. With a quick surge he pulled himself up beside her.

“Let’s get to Vagabond,” he said, helping her up. They ran up the gangway to the main dock, where Lisa and her mother hugged each other.

“Where’s Skippy?” Jeanne asked as they all rushed on.

“Still on the grass,” Lisa said happily, pointing.

While Neil picked Skippy up into his arms, Lisa and Jeanne grabbed their bags. Together they hurried back along the street to the town dock, Neil already beginning to worry about Vagabond.

As he surveyed the end of the dock Neil was surprised to see that the crowd had evaporated, but just as he was feeling reassured he saw trouble: seven or eight people had gotten aboard Vagabond, which had somehow drifted back to the dock. The stern of its starboard hull was banging periodically against a piling.

Neil felt a flush of anger at Jim. When he went to board Vagabond, he saw a man in a bright pink shirt and green pants standing on the hull and brandishing a pistol.

“No more on board,” the young man said to Neil.

Feeling an incongruous rush of bitter mirth, Neil laughed. The man frowned, made uneasy both by the laughter and by the gun in Neil’s belt.

“If you plan to try to sail this boat,” Neil said, “you’d better let me aboard.”

“Neil!” he heard Jim shout and saw him standing in the side cockpit behind the man with the pistol.

“Okay,” the man said. “You can come aboard. But you’ll have to give me that gun.”

“Like hell I will,” Neil replied.

“He’s the captain,” Jim said. “No one can sail us out of here except him.”

The man stared at Neil and then shrugged.

Neil stepped down and then helped Jeanne, Lisa, and Skip down after him. He could feel his. body tense at the invasion of his boat and remained on deck for the moment to steady himself. Lisa had rushed up to Jim and buried her head against his chest, clinging to him. Neil noticed a woman breast-feeding her child in the side cockpit, three suitcases scattered around her feet. As he went past Jim and Lisa into the wheelhouse he saw two men and a woman standing on one side looking nervously at a thickset man sitting opposite them. In the farther cockpit someone was sprawled on the deck with a woman bent over him weeping. Neil turned to Jim, who had followed him into the wheelhouse.

“How many people have guns?” he asked.

“Just that young guy guarding the starboard hull and him,” Jim replied, nodding toward the man who was sitting on the settee at the rear of the wheelhouse, one leg crossed over the other, dressed in a brown business suit, a large .45 and Jim’s .22 cradled in his lap. The man met Neil’s gaze with alert coldness.

“What happened?” Neil asked.

“The wind shifted a little,” said Jim earnestly. “And Vagabond swung around closer to the docks. When I went forward to shorten up the anchor, a whole mass of people got aboard. The two guys with guns herded half the crowd back up onto the docks and… shot the man in the side cockpit when he refused to get off.”

Jeanne had passed them and was kneeling now beside the weeping woman. Lisa stayed with Skippy, listening. Neil turned to the man with the .45. In his mid-thirties, thickset, with dark, receding hair, he stared back at Neil with quiet confidence.

“We’re sailing over to Crisfield to pick up a friend,” he announced. The man simply nodded. “I don’t appreciate people forcing themselves onto my boat at gunpoint,” Neil added coldly.

“These are tough times, buddy,” the man said softly. “And I didn’t notice you or your friend selling tickets.”

“You had to shoot someone?” Neil asked.

“There were thirty people on board,” the man replied quietly. “Your young friend said this boat couldn’t sail out of here with that much weight. Jerry and I kicked twenty of them off. A guy pulled a knife on Jerry, and Jerry shot him. It’s only a shoulder wound, and I already patched it up. Nothing serious.”

“I’d like our .22 back,” Neil said quietly.

The man looked down at his lap, as if surprised to find Jim’s rifle lying there.

“Sure,” he said after a pause. “Just borrowed it for a minute.” He handed it to Neil.

“Lisa,” said Neil, turning to the young girl, “get Skippy and your mother down into the port cabin. Jim, get the sails back up.”

He turned back to the man with the .45.

“Do you know much about sailing?” he asked him.

“Not much,” he said.

“How about your friend, Jerry?”

“He thinks he’s standing on the front of the boat.”

Neil glanced at the pink-shirted Jerry, who stood nervously at the stern of the port hull, watching the dock.

“All right,” said Neil. “The motor’s out, so I’ll trust you’re not stupid enough to get rid of Jim and me, since we’re the only ones who can sail it. I’d appreciate it, however, if you’d both put your guns away.”

“Sure,” said the man with a slight smile. “You’re the captain.”

Jim had raised the two forward sails, and as Neil headed there to help him with the anchor Jeanne appeared from below.

“Where’s Frank?” she asked.

“We’re meeting him in Crisfield.”

“And then?”

“Out to sea,” he replied, and as he moved forward he frowned at how simple those three words made it sound. He doubted they’d ever see Frank again, and their chances of getting past Norfolk to the ocean in one piece were probably small. He’d be happy if they made it to Crisfield without the wind dying or one of the outlaws shooting someone. But one step at a time. Jim came aft after making fast the main halyard.

“Take the wheel, Jim,” he said, “and put her on the port tack. I’ll handle the anchor.”

“I couldn’t stop them,” Jim burst out unexpectedly. “The guy in the wheelhouse said he’d shoot me.”

Neil nodded and thought of the man in the wheelhouse.

“He would have,” Neil said. “Now go.”

In five minutes Vagabond was laboring across the bay at six knots in a nice breeze. Neil found himself looking for Jeanne, but the wheelhouse remained empty except for Jim and the cold-eyed Buddha with the gun. With Vagabond moving again Neil felt almost content, even strangely happy. Then, looking aft, he saw that the cloud mass from Washington was still spreading; the sky directly above them was no longer blue. He watched it for a moment, feeling both angry and afraid, then went back to work.

Although the traffic between Crisfield and Salisbury had been thin, at the airport the parking lot was overflowing. There were three Maryland State Police cars and eight or nine policemen, but they seemed unclear about what they were supposed to be doing.

Inside the drab terminal, people were strangely quiet. The room was crowded, but what little movement there was, was slowed down, as if everyone were moving through molasses.

As Frank walked directly toward the door marked Manager’s Office he had to push his way through two long lines that stretched far out into the room from the ticket counter.

“I want to buy or charter a plane,” he said to the small, spare man seated at a desk who had invited him in when he knocked.

After looking at Frank for a moment, the man frowned down at the papers he’d been going through.

“All the regular charter planes are filled,” he said. “There are also twenty or thirty private planes operating out of this airport, and a few are unofficially selling seats to passengers. The going rate is five thousand dollars a seat.”

“Any of them going to New York?” Frank asked eagerly.

“None going north,” the manager replied. “Most are going to the Bahamas or the West Indies. One or two of the bigger ones to South America.”

“Then I want to buy a plane and hire a pilot.”

“No one will fly you to New York.”

“Money talks,” said Frank.

“Not very loud as far as heading north is concerned.” The manager squinted up at Frank. “May I ask why you’re so hot to get to what’s left of New York?” he asked.

“Family.”

“Ahhh,” the manager said and shook his head. “Well, I can’t help you. The private planes are housed in C and D Hangars at the west end of the field. If someone wants to sell a plane, that’s where they’d be.”

When Frank got to Hangar C, he came upon a flurry of activity: two small planes being worked on, one being pushed out of the hangar, and three or four clusters of people talking. Frank began asking people who might sell him a plane to fly north.

“There’s only one guy here I know of who said he’d let his plane go north if the money was right,” one man told him, “and that’s Tommy Trainer over in Hangar D.”

“How’ll I find him?” Frank asked.

“Little guy. Wears a natty white suit,” the man answered. “He owns the two-engine Beechcraft over in the back corner. But, buddy, you don’t think you’re going to make it north and back through what’s happening up there, do you?”

Frank wheeled and headed off toward Hangar D. Tommy Trainer was a flashily dressed little man with dark, slicked-down hair and an absurdly large cigar. He was checking his Beechcraft with a mechanic when Frank found him. After listening to Frank explain what he wanted to do, the little man just continued to stare at him and chewed lightly on his unlit cigar.

“Well, suh,” he said with the dignified drawl of a southern gentleman, completely at variance with his bookmaker’s appearance. “Ah’d like to help you, I really would. But I believe the general opinion is that it’s dangerous traveling north these days. I believe there’s just a bit of risk involved. Wouldn’t you agree, suh?”

“A lot of risk,” Frank said. “I’ll pay accordingly.”

“That’s right generous of you, suh, and I appreciate it. I’ll tell you what,” he continued in his southern drawl, “I can’t charter you my plane ’cause the insurance doesn’t cover it, you know, but I’ll sell you the plane. Let’s see. One hundred thousand dollars. How does that sound, suh?”

“What about a pilot?”

“I believe I might be able to obtain you a pilot for… yes, for another twenty.”

Frank, who sometimes quibbled over the price of a twenty-five cent sinker, felt a flash of anger. The beat-up plane couldn’t be worth more than twenty-five thousand dollars, and the pilot would be doing at most a half-day’s work.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

“In cash, gold, or silver,” said Tommy Trainer.

Frank frowned, his forward momentum checked. He looked at Tommy Trainer. Where the hell could he get the money?

“Where’s the nearest bank?” Frank finally asked.

“Bank!” Tommy Trainer exclaimed. “It’s a little late for banks, I’m afraid.”

Frank stared at him uncertainly.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

On the short drive from the airport into Salisbury, Frank realized that it wasn’t going to work. He needed a plane this instant, and the banking system, even at the best of times, was not used to producing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in an instant. In these times…

The situation turned out to be worse than he had imagined. Most banks hadn’t even opened. The two that had were mobbed, with long lines outside their doors. And he realized, of course, that there was no phone or teletype contact with either of his New York City banks nor his bank in Oyster Bay.

“They’re not doing any banking business with anybody except their regular customers,” a man told Frank. “I doubt that there’s a single bank in the country today that doesn’t have the same policy.”

Defeated, Frank returned to his car and sat slumped in shock. He might be able to steal the plane, he thought, pay for it later. But he couldn’t fly it.

He supposed he could kidnap a pilot… . But gradually he realized that there was no way. He couldn’t get there by car. He couldn’t fly. He was stuck.

As he slowly drove back to Crisfield he felt disoriented by the succeeding shocks of the day. All his life he had been a doer, a man who faced problems squarely and set about solving them. His success in the world of New York City real estate was based partly on this ability to deal with problems as soon as they arose, to make fast decisions, and to get the job done. It also helped that he wasn’t afraid of risks. He enjoyed taking risks.

He had wanted to treat the unthinkable catastrophe of nuclear war as he would an emergency cash-flow problem, for the challenge of the war stimulated him, the logistical challenge of rescuing his wife, retrieving his financial position, surviving—all these got his adrenaline flowing, had him acting decisively, rationally, quickly.

But the experiences he’d had in his three hours in Salisbury represented for him the psychological equivalent of being bombed. He had begun to realize that all of his paper wealth—his stocks, bonds, mutual funds, Treasury certificates—were probably worthless. And the tangible assets he owned—the apartment houses in New York City, his home in Oyster Bay, the shopping center in Englewood— had all, with the hopeful exception of his house in Oyster Bay, been destroyed. But worse, he realized that the “problems” and “challenges” presented by the holocaust were not something that could be dealt with. He couldn’t buy a plane, or a car, or even, maybe, a tank of gasoline. He couldn’t even telephone anyone. He was almost helpless. Suddenly, overnight, he was an unemployed pauper.

But a live pauper. As he drove back toward Crisfield with the car radio tuned to the appalling news—cities with which all communication had been lost, countries with which all communication had been lost—a large part of him began to fear for his life and wanted to scurry for the nearest hole. The numbing, incomprehensible, dreamlike list of American cities and defense installations that had been struck by nuclear missiles or bombs dazed him. He heard the Secretary of Defense urging people to stick to their jobs if their jobs were important, to report for service if they weren’t. In one sentence the secretary warned against needless panic and in another advised people to evacuate “contaminated” areas. (He didn’t mention any by name.) Frank learned that the United States had bombed Cuba, that Europe was being devastated, London wiped out, Moscow, Leningrad, numerous other unpronounceable Russian cities, Russian forces in Iraq had been attacked. China and Japan had been hit. Several countries in South America and Africa had loudly proclaimed their neutrality.

His fear for himself began to grow. He knew that part of his frantic activity to get up north to his wife was based on the simple fact that it was the expected thing to do. It was a man’s job to protect his wife. The thought of her there in their house, helpless, confused, worried about Jimmy, worried about him, too, huddled together with Susan—that thought made him sad, made him feel needed, made him want to find a way north. But the only thing left now was Vagabond. He was frightened: he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. All hope of salvation lay with Vagabond.

With the wind shifting further to the north. Vagabond had one long tack across the bay to Crisfield. Despite the extra ton of weight from the new passengers and their luggage, she plugged along at six or seven knots until she had gotten within two miles of the town and the wind fell. Then her speed dropped to two knots and she began to wallow and crawl. Neil hailed a small cruiser and bribed its owner to tow them the last two miles to the dock.

The trip was uneventful. Although thin wisps of the dark cloud mass over Washington seemed to have floated almost directly overhead, there was no obvious sign of radioactive fallout. The ten passengers displayed a kind of stunned obedience that made the boat handling easy. Jeanne had spent the first hour and a half below, but with Skippy napping and Lisa helping Jim at the helm, she came up and stood beside Neil in the port cockpit.

He was again aware of her as a woman, her bare brown legs and arms set off by the white shorts and shirt. Her long hair was brushed now and tied up on top of her head. She stared forward for a while without speaking.

“Do you think Frank will be there?” she finally asked.

“There’s no way of knowing,” he answered. “We’ll just have to see.”

“And then what?”

“I suppose that will be mostly up to Frank,” he said after a pause.

“We should leave,” she said with unexpected force. “Get out of the country.

He glanced at her. She seemed more angry than fearful.

“I agree,” he said, “but I’m afraid Frank doesn’t.”

“I just listened to a radio down in the cabin,” she went on. “The whole world is collapsing.”

Neil felt a tremor of fear, partly because of what she said and partly because of her intensity.

“I imagine it is.”

“And we’ve done it,” she continued, staring forward again. “Our country and Russia are destroying the world.”

Neil was aware that two of the women sitting in the wheelhouse were looking at her uneasily.

“If we live through this madness, we’ll have to create a new world,” she said, her eyes seeming to make a personal appeal to Neil. “We’ll have to create a family, support each other, put an end to the selfish distinctions that led us to this horror.” She looked at him for confirmation.

Neil felt an unaccountable heaviness. He supposed it was because he didn’t think the species that had killed a hundred million of its own kind in one day was likely to be too great on its next go-round. If there was a next go-round.

“First we have to survive,” he replied.

“Yes,” she said, seeming to relent somewhat. “But, my God, how coldhearted this war is making us survivors. I think you’re the only friendly face I’ve seen all day.”

“Cornered and fleeing animals aren’t nice,” Neil said. She nodded and frowned.

“Back before you rescued me, I could have killed someone with that butcher knife,” she said softly, looking quite puzzled and a little saddened by the knowledge. “How depressing that is.”

Neil didn’t comment. Two passengers were leaning out over the combing in the port cockpit, and he wondered why until he saw that one of them was being seasick.

“And that way madness lies,” Jeanne went on, then paused and looked up at him. “I’m glad I spared you,” she said. Suddenly and unexpectedly she was smiling up at him.

“I am too,” he replied, smiling back.

“My personal Captain Luck,” she said.

“How so?” he asked, puzzled.

“You said that before we can create a new world we have to find the luck to survive,” she said, strangely gay all of a sudden. “I guess I found you.” She paused. “Although I hope your style isn’t always to throw me overboard.”

After the horror of Point Lookout, Crisfield was as quiet and relaxed as a picturesque fishing village should be. There were no mobs and few boats. Neil supposed that survivors from the Philadelphia area had more escape routes open to them than those who were south and east of Washington and Baltimore.

After Vagabond was tied up at the dock in front of a large green fishing trawler named the Lucky Emerald, he helped his passengers ashore. Most were bewildered; it seemed to Neil that if someone had offered them a boat ride back to Point Lookout many of them would have crowded aboard. As they were leaving, Jeanne came up beside him where he stood overseeing the exodus.

“Can’t we invite some of them to stay with us?” she asked him.

“That’s Frank’s decision,” he replied, feeling like something of a liar. “When he comes, we can reconsider it.”

“They have no place to go.”

“And we have nothing to feed them with,” Neil explained.

“I was in their place four hours ago,” she said, looking away.

“I know,” he said gently, frowning. “But we can’t save everybody. We’ll be lucky if we can save ourselves.”

“We should try to save as many as we can,” she said.

“We haven’t even enough food to last ourselves more than two or three days,” he went on. “That’s our job now: to try to get some supplies aboard.”

“I’d like to invite that woman with the baby,” Jeanne persisted.

Neil looked at the retreating passengers.

“All right, Jeanne,” he answered. “But explain to her about the food situation.”

While Jeanne hurried forward to overtake the nursing mother Neil turned to speak to Jim; as he did he saw that the man with the .45 was still sitting on the settee and beside him the much younger man with the pink shirt and green pants. Neil went over to them.

“What are your plans?” he asked the older man.

“What are yours?”

“We wait here until ten to pick up the owner, then we’re probably heading out the bay into the Atlantic.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“We’d like to come along.”

Neil studied the man. His business suit seemed somehow inappropriate, fraudulent. His round unshaven face never seemed to lose its placid expression. The young man beside him looked morose.

“Who are you?” Neil asked.

“Conrad Macklin,” he replied. “This is my friend Jerry.”

“What do you do?”

The man shrugged. “I used to be a Marine,” he said. “Paramedic. After Vietnam, I flew planes, freelancing. Now… I sail a trimaran.”

“We don’t have much food,” Neil said.

Macklin shrugged again.

“We’re going shopping,” Neil said, starting to feel irritated. “Could you two contribute some cash to the cause?”

Macklin took out his billfold, removed two bills, and handed them to Neil. They were hundreds.

“Jim,” said Neil, turning away. “I want you and Jeanne to go into town to the nearest supermarket and buy everything you can carry. I’ll give you three hundred dollars and don’t hesitate to pay double for anything you can get. Triple if you have to.”

Jeanne reappeared in the wheelhouse alone.

“What happened?” Neil asked.

“She’d hooked up with a man and he had a car,” she answered, apparently disappointed that her offer had been rejected.

Neil wrote out a brief list of basics for Jeanne and Jim and sent them off. Skippy had fallen asleep during the crossing, so Neil had Lisa begin making an inventory of the supplies already on hand. Although uneasy about the presence of Macklin and his friend, he decided Macklin already had what he wanted—namely a boat to escape in—so now there should be nothing to worry about.

He took a few minutes to get Lisa started on the inventory and was impressed by how quickly she worked; then he went back up into the wheelhouse.

“I’ve got an important job I’d like you to do for us,” he said to Macklin.

“Yes?”

“The boat’s got a bent propeller shaft and we can’t get it out,” Neil explained. “We need a slide-hammer puller—it’s a tool. I want you to try the boatyard over there and see if you can rent, buy, or borrow one. How about it?”

“Why don’t you go?” Macklin asked.

Neil met the man’s cold gaze with equal coldness.

“You’ll help when I ask you to help or you’re not sailing with us,” he said, feeling absurdly for an instant as if he were in some western and both he and Macklin were about to go for their guns.

Macklin in fact looked down at the pistol in his lap and caressed the barrel with his left hand.

“That sounds reasonable,” Macklin said and, standing up, put the gun into a shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket. He smiled for the first time. “Relax, captain,” he went on. “I’m just out to save my ass like the rest of you.”

“A slide-hammer puller,” Neil repeated coldly.

“Got it,” Macklin said and ambled off the boat.

“And I want you,” Neil said to the man named Jerry, “to go along the docks and see if there’s an outlet we can get water from.” The man—he seemed to be only a couple of years older than Jim— nodded and went off.

The other thing is fishing gear, Neil thought, and his mind immediately returned to the task of preparing the boat for a long survival voyage. It would help if they had extra nylon line and metal lures, another rod maybe too. Those might actually be easier to pick up than food. He looked restlessly ashore: Jeanne and Jim were already returning, empty-handed. The two of them jumped down onto the side deck and came over to him.

“There was a line forty yards long outside the supermarket,” Jeanne explained. “And then the manager came out, counted off about twenty people, and told the rest of us to go home.”

“Every other grocery store was closed,” Jim added. “Half of them were boarded up and the others had an armed guard.”

Neil simply nodded.

“Give me the money, Jeanne,” he said. As Jeanne fished in her pocket he said to Jim, “We need to get water aboard. All we can get. I sent that guy Jerry to locate an open tap. Fill the tank and all the plastic jugs.”

“How about that leaky ten-gallon container?” Jim asked.

“That too,” Neil replied. “I sent Macklin—that’s the one with the .45—after the puller. I’m going to take a shot at getting us some supplies. Stay here, get your .22 out again, and don’t let anyone aboard except Macklin. When he’s back, have him stand guard.”

“You trust him?” Jim asked.

“I trust him to keep unnecessary people off the boat,” Neil explained.

“Okay.”

Neil hesitated, gauging Jim’s character.

“This time…” he began, as Jim looked at him attentively, “if you feel you have to shoot… shoot.”

“Macklin?” asked Jim.

“Anybody,” Neil replied.

The situation in Crisfield was just as Jeanne and Jim had described it. Fortunately the local hardware store was open.

“Cash only,” a clerk announced as he entered. “All prices triple what’s marked.”

Neil went to the fishing gear section and quickly picked out three lures, two wire leaders, and 500 feet of 30-pound test line. As he walked over to the cashier he grabbed two kerosene lanterns. The manager said he didn’t sell kerosene, but Neil bought the lamps anyway.

Back out on the main street he considered his tactics. He’d hidden his gun under a loose-fitting jacket and the bag of supplies he was carrying. He’d become aware throughout the day of a feeling he hadn’t had for a long time: that he was ready and able to kill, that he had killed in the past, and that this readiness gave him a power and confidence in this situation that was essential for survival. He felt he could sense when others lacked that readiness—as with the gray-haired man on the yawl who had kidnapped Jeanne—and when they did have it, as Macklin did.

This feeling of power had always bothered him, ever since he’d first sensed it in Vietnam more than a decade ago, but he knew that now it was one of his chief assets.

Neil passed a closed grocery store, behind the door of which sat a fat man with a shotgun across his knees. Neil felt it would be easy enough to take such a store, but it didn’t feel right, and he walked on. Ahead he saw a line of about twelve people outside a large Foodtown store. He went around to the back. The first door he came to was locked but at the other end of the building he saw another. A man in a white apron was leaving with an armload of boxes. When Neil followed him back to the door, he turned around.

“You can’t come in this way,” the young man said.

Neil pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and held it out to him.

“I’d like to go in and do a little shopping for my family,” he said casually.

The boy squinted at the bill, grimaced, and shook his head. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “The manager would know.”

Neil let the bill flutter to the ground and pulled out his gun.

“Tell the manager I pulled a gun on you but that I promised to pay double for all my food.”

Neil pushed past him, slipped the gun back under his belt, and went in the back of the supermarket.

Inside was frenzied order: it was like a normal supermarket, except that everyone was moving twice as fast as usual and their carts were twice as full. The shelves were three-quarters empty. The room was unlit: the usual harsh glitter of a supermarket was lacking. Neil looked back at the aproned clerk—whom he noticed pocketing something, presumably the hundred—and patted his waist where the gun was. The boy smirked uneasily.

Neil took an empty metal cart, put in the bag of fishing gear, and entered the fray. He knew he’d have to take what he could get, which wasn’t much. He found six cans of pears in syrup and eight cans of mixed fruit: that was all that was left in the canned fruit section.

In the dried fruit section he was luckier. Since dried fruit was ridiculously expensive and not all that essential except to a starving man, there was a lot left. Neil took it all. There were still a few boxes of dried noodles and spaghetti, and he threw those in, followed by a large bag of potatoes. Frozen and refrigerated foods were mostly gone, which reminded him that Crisfield had no electricity. He wondered whether the lights were out in the rest of the world as well. There were some tinned crackers left and he grabbed them, but all the canned meats were gone.

Forty minutes later, his cart overflowing, Neil headed again for the back door. There was a man standing beside it with a rifle, its butt resting awkwardly on the floor. Neil took out all of the rest of his money, a hundred and sixty dollars, and held it out to him.

“To save time I’d like to leave by the back way,” he said. “Here’s what I owe, plus tip.”

“What’s the trouble, Calvin?” a voice called out behind him.

“He wants to leave by the back way,” said Calvin.

“Here’s more than enough money to cover my purchases,” said Neil.

“How much money you got?”

“A hundred and sixty dollars,” Neil said, handing it to him.

“Shit, mister,” the manager said, taking the money. “This don’t cover much more than half what you’ve got there. Our prices are triple.”

“Then I’ll go to my boat and bring back more money.”

“You do that.”

Neil pulled out his gun and pointed it at the belly of the man with the rifle.

“I’ll take my food with me now though,” Neil said. “Won’t I?” he asked the manager sharply.

“Let him go,” the manager said, backing away.

And Neil left.

As he pushed the cart across the bumpy back lot of the supermarket he felt tremendous relief. The food situation had been his greatest worry. Now, although what he’d bought normally wouldn’t last six people more than a week at the most, rationed it might go a month. He’d even bought a large container of dog food as a compact, non-perishable source of protein.

He picked up the pace when he hit the smoother sidewalk of the main street. It was almost five o’clock, and if Macklin had located the puller, he could start work on the propeller shaft before Frank got back. If Frank got back.

When he came around the corner and made for the dock, Neil stopped. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Ahead of him was the fishing trawler Lucky Emerald, and in front of it was nothing. Vagabond was gone.

Abandoning the shopping cart in the marina parking lot, Neil ran to the dock, his eyes searching the water for the trimaran. It wasn’t in sight. Even while the dread in his stomach told him the boat had been pirated he tried to think of why else it might have been moved. Frank had returned and taken it to a boatyard… But they would have left someone to tell him, and as he let his eyes search up and down the docks, he saw no sign of either Vagabond or any of its passengers.

He needed a boat he could use to give chase. But chase where?

“Ahoy, Lucky Emerald!” he shouted at the trawler. A big red-faced man came to the door of the deckhouse and looked down.

“What happened to the trimaran?” he shouted up to him.

The man looked at the spot where Vagabond had been, then out into the bay.

“Sailed out of here close to an hour ago,” he said.

“Was there any trouble aboard?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Where was she heading?”

The man stroked his chin and scowled.

“Southwest,” he said. “Out the main channel.”

“Have you got a small boat I can borrow to give chase?” Neil asked. “My boat’s been stolen.”

The man shook his head.

Neil went back to his food cart and wheeled it up to the dock next to the Lucky Emerald.

“Keep an eye on this for me,” he shouted and went to find a boat. Macklin had hijacked Vagabond, and Neil raged at his own stupidity. He’d assumed Macklin wasn’t a sailor and wouldn’t try anything with a crippled sailboat, but if he had gotten hold of a puller, he may have felt he should take Vagabond while the taking was good. Poor Jim.

Over the next forty minutes Neil went down the docks and around to two marinas trying to buy, borrow, or steal a small boat. No one would help him. Twice he was turned away at gunpoint. After he’d tried the last dock in the village, he turned back in a fury. He stopped a young man who was walking along carrying a fuel tank and asked him for help but got another “Sorry, fellow.” On the street again, a police car came toward him with its siren wailing, and Neil tried to wave it down. It whizzed past.

At the dock where Vagabond had been tied up he found Frank standing with his hands in his pockets staring dull-eyed out at the water.

“Frank!” he called.

“Where are you hiding my boat?” Frank asked with a puzzled frown as Neil came up to him.

“She’s gone, Frank,” he answered. “Stolen. Close to two hours ago.”

Frank’s already tired face looked stunned.

“Wh-what?”

“Two men, I think,” he went on. “And as far as I know Jim and Jeanne Forester and her children are still aboard.”

“Stolen?” Frank repeated, looking even more bewildered. He walked past Neil to the edge of the dock to look out the channel toward the bay. Several gulls were circling behind a small runabout, but there was no sign of Vagabond.

“We’ve got to get a fast boat and catch Vagabond before she gets too far down the bay,” Neil said to him.

Frank looked at Neil with glazed eyes and didn’t reply. He hadn’t shaved, and he looked haggard. He turned back toward the water.

“If Vagabond gets too far away, there’s no hope for any of us,” Neil persisted. “I can’t get through to the Coast Guard by phone. We’ve probably got to get her back ourselves. In another few hours everything will be lost.”

Neil saw that Frank was in shock, and he felt a similar sense of helplessness beginning to flood through his own body. A small fishing smack putted by along the channel, and the little old man standing stiffly at the wheel looked at Neil and smiled and winked. Still preoccupied, Neil didn’t register anything at first and then came alive.

“Hey! Captain! Ahoy, there!” he shouted, and ran up to the water’s

The old man was facing forward again, and Neil thought he must not have heard. He felt his shoulders slump, but the fishing smack abruptly swung to the left, away from them, and kept circling until it was heading back toward the dock. As Neil watched and Frank came up beside him, the boat, Lucy Mae, angled into the dock.

“That boat’s too slow,” Frank said.

“Not with this light wind and rising tide,” Neil answered, and they watched as Lucy Mae coasted forward, banging first one piling and then the next, and stopping inches short of the Lucky Emerald only after the old fisherman had snubbed a line around a piling.

“Pretty neat, huh?” the old man on Lucy Mae shouted with a big grin. “Ain’t got no reverse. Makes docking a challenge. Help you, cap?”

“Yes,” Neil said quickly. “Pirates stole our trimaran about two hours ago and kidnapped four of our people—a woman, two children.”

“You own that big three-engine spaceship?” the old man interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Saw her sailing out of here about four thirty,’” the old man said. “Thought I’d got trapped in a Star Wars movie. Nice ship though, if you don’t mind looking like you just got in from Mars. When I—”

“Our boat was stolen,” Neil interjected. “We’d like your help.”

“You mean chase the pirates?” the old man asked, scowling.

“Just help us find them,” Neil said. “That’s all.”

“I’ll pay you five thousand dollars,” Frank offered.

“These fellas got guns?” the old man asked, squinting up at Neil.

“Yes, but…”

“And you want me to take you in the Lucy Mae and go poking around after them?”

“Yes,” said Neil. “But we—”

“Well, git aboard,” the old man said. “Sun’s gonna be settin’ pretty soon and I don’t see so good at night.” With a flip of his wrist he released the line from the piling and went back into the deckhouse. Frank hung back doubtfully on the dock, but Neil rushed off to get the groceries.

When Neil had maneuvered the cart up to the edge of the dock, he carefully lowered it down to Frank, who was standing in Lucy Mae’s cockpit. Frank couldn’t quite handle all the weight, and the cart smashed down onto the deck and tipped over, the groceries spilling out like a load of dead fish. Neil leapt aboard.

“Let’s go, cap,” he said.

“Push out my bow there, sonny,” the old fisherman said to Frank, “so my bowsprit don’t go and goose Lucky Emerald. Cap’n Rivers is partic’lar who gooses her.”

Frank pushed out the bow, the old man shoved the gear into forward, and the old smack putted noisily forward, swinging around to head out toward the bay.

“I don’t have the five thousand dollars, uh, ready to hand,” Frank said into the ear of the old man, Captain Olly, almost having to shout over the noise of the engine.

“I don’t want no money, cap,” Olly said. “I ain’t had a chance to get involved with pirates since… back in ’74 I think it was…”

He turned Lucy Mae a little to starboard to follow the channel to the open bay. “And then the pirate was me.” Neil began picking up the rolling cans and other groceries and righting the cart.

“What you fellas think of this war?” Olly remarked to Frank, who stared back at him dumbly.

“I sort of like it,” the old man said. “Hell, I was planning to die this year anyway, what with depression and gall bladders and all, but this here war makes everything interesting again.”

“My wife may have been killed in this interesting war,” Frank shouted back angrily.

“Well, I figure there was four or five million other wives killed today,” the old man countered. “Probably two or three of mine. Still, nothing beats being alive now, does it?”

Frank looked at the grinning, grotesque face in stunned silence.

“You fellas got any idea where these pirates are headed?” he asked amiably.

“No,” Neil replied sharply. “But we’ve got to assume they’re heading south.” Olly nodded.

“How fast will this thing go?” Neil shouted. Frank was standing off to the right, scanning the horizon for a glimpse of Vagabond. There was a big motor yacht anchored off to port and several runabouts within sight, but no Vagabond.

“She’ll do eight knots in the morning,” the old man shouted back, “but in the late afternoon she gets a little pooped.”

“How much fuel?”

“Ten hours’ worth. With you big fellas aboard maybe only eight.”

As they churned out the channel from Crisfield, there was a large low island to their left that blocked their view to the south, and Neil strained impatiently for them to get past it.

“Do you have any binoculars aboard?” Neil asked.

“’Fraid not,” the captain replied. “Don’t need glasses to see fish.”

Neil had been gauging the wind and tide, and could feel hope rising. The tide was coming in, and Vagabond would be bucking it if she was headed south. The wind was still light, so it wasn’t much help to them either. Would they try to hide in a cove or inlet to repair the propeller shaft? Would they sail between Tangier and Smith islands to get into the main part of the bay? He thought of the tactics he would adopt if he were Macklin and decided he’d just head south as fast as possible. They could work on the shaft while under way; the farther off they were standing from shore, the easier it would be to see an approaching enemy.

He took out his pistol and examined it to see if it had been damaged by the salt water. He removed the clip, cleaned it, and put it back in. There were five bullets. He hesitated, sighted on a drifting piece of Styrofoam, and pulled the trigger. The gun barked, and the Styrofoam shattered.

“You have any weapons aboard?” Neil asked the old man.

“What?” Captain Olly said, cupping his ear.

“Weapons! You got weapons aboard?” Neil shouted.

“Gaff. Boathook. Two knives. A harpoon. I mostly hunt fish.”

“Hey, there’s water coming in over your cabin sole,” Frank shouted from the entranceway to the little forward cabin. He looked back at Olly and Neil in alarm.

“Well, if it worries you,” the old man answered, “you can exercise that pump you got your right hand on. I don’t generally pump until my bait box floats aft. You know how to pump?”

Frank saw that he had his hand on an old-fashioned manual bilge pump, and without replying he began pulling it up and pushing it down.

“You spaceship pilots don’t get much chance to pump bilges, I ’spect,” the old man said to Neil with a grin, “but it keeps the body in trim, it does, ’specially in a gale when you figure you’re two inches from havin’ more water inside your boat than out.”

They had finally cleared the island to port, and Neil searched the horizon to the south. He estimated that Vagabond would only be making four or five knots, and they were being headed by a knot and a half tide. In two hours they would have a five- or six-mile lead at the most. With binoculars he could see that far. With the naked eye…

He climbed up on the foredeck and then onto the wheelhouse roof, balancing uncertainly as Lucy Mae rhythmically hobbyhorsed through the water.

There were dozens of boats in sight. He knew they were pouring down the Potomac from Washington and probably from the northern parts of the bay too. Patiently he focused on one distant boat after another. He hoped some emotional vibration would permit him to recognize Vagabond, even if it were only a white speck on the horizon. He saw nothing that registered.

As Lucy Mae proceeded due south and left more and more of Cobble Island behind to port Neil began to sweep the horizon off to the east southeast. It might make a certain sense to get out of the tidal flow in Tangier Sound and into the quieter waters of Pocomoke Sound. He saw what appeared to be a sloop three or four miles off but almost nothing else. The only advantage Macklin might have there was that any boat approaching him out of the main channel was likely to be up to no good as far as he was concerned. Neil stared hard at the sloop again and suddenly he saw it was Vagabond sailing without her mizzen.

“Hard to port,” he yelled down at the old fisherman, and leapt back onto the foredeck and then into the cockpit.

“Our boat’s at about east southeast,” he said.

Captain Olly squinted through his dirty wheelhouse window and scowled.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

“Get these groceries out of sight, Frank,” Neil said. As Frank began to maneuver the cart down below, Neil could see to his right a spectacular wash of red spreading across the horizon, the great gray mass from the explosion now an incongruously glorious crimson. Only the undersides of a few cumulus clouds were still touched with light, and then they too turned to pink. Lucy Mae chugged forward at only about six knots.

“You fellows got a plan?” the old man asked.

Neil and Frank looked at each other, and when Olly saw that they didn’t, he shook his head.

“You ain’t got a plan,” he said, frowning at them like a disappointed father.

“If they’re becalmed, we can offer to give them a tow,” Neil mused aloud.

“I don’t think they’s gonna be too trustful when they sees the men whose boat they just stole.”

“The two of us will hide below,” Neil went on. “Captain, you offer them a tow or to sell them some food, and bring Lucy Mae alongside the trimaran. Have one of them come aboard to make their towline fast or to check your food supplies. It’ll be fairly dark by the time we overtake them. When one comes aboard Lucy Mae, I’ll go out the forward hatch and rush the one who’s still on board Vagabond. You and Frank jump the man who’s here on Lucy Mae.”

“Sounds good, sonny.”

“Can we go any faster?” Neil asked.

“Maybe, but those fellas may have binoculars. You fellas better lie low.”

“Frank,” Neil said, “get a big bag of groceries and leave it out in plain sight. Stow the rest in the cabin.”

Neil looked forward. The sun had set, but in the early twilight they could still see for almost a mile. Lucy Mae chugged steadily east southeast. Neil could no longer see Vagabond.

“I don’t see it,” Frank said from beside him.

“Where?” Neil asked urgently, misunderstanding what he’d said.

“I said I don’t see anything!” Frank shouted at Neil.

Cobble Island was still to their left, some shoals to their right and dead ahead…

“There she is!” Neil said, pointing, and there, barely visible a mile away in the dusk, her three hulls silhouetted now against the distant shore, was Vagabond. Captain Olly slowed down his boat and squinted into the distance. All three of them were straining forward in the dusk as Lucy Mae chugged ahead loudly.

“Get below!” Olly shouted, and just then the bright white flash of a spotlight from Vagabond swept over Lucy Mae.

Frank and Neil ducked their heads and scrambled forward into the little cabin. The old man opened up the throttle some to increase speed back to eight knots. He switched on his running lights.

“What are you going to do?” Neil shouted over the hammering of the engine. He was peering up at the old man from the cabin entrance way.

“Same plan, sonny!” the captain yelled back and then motioned for them to be quiet. His hand trembling, Captain Olly’s face was pale. With his lips drawn back exposing his gums and his few remaining teeth, his face had a slightly mad expression. He kept his little craft throbbing steadily forward, and the strange three-hulled, insectlike trimaran loomed up slowly out of the darkness. For ten minutes the two boats drew closer, Neil and Frank straightening up the grocery mess below, Captain Olly eventually singing softly to himself.

“Ain’t gonna sink her till the sun sets low,” he began in a low, cracking voice. “Don’t care how much the wind does blow, I got a few fishies still to stow, so… ain’t gonna sink her till the sun sets low… Ahoy, spaceship!” he suddenly shouted and Neil took out his pistol and crawled forward to undo the forward hatch cover.

Lucy Mae was only fifty feet behind and slightly to port of Vagabond when the old man hailed her. He slowed down slightly while he waited for an answer. There were two men in the unlit wheelhouse of the trimaran, and one of them moved into the port cockpit.

“What do you want?” Jerry shouted.

“You fellas want me to give you a tow?” Olly shouted back. “Do it pretty cheap.” He slowed Lucy Mae down until she was going at the same speed as the trimaran, now only thirty feet away. Jerry turned back to the man at the helm.

“No, thanks,” he finally shouted back.

“You fellas stay on this course and in another two minutes you’ll run aground,” Olly said amiably. The two men looked at each other and Macklin went forward to check the instrument panel.

“Our depthmeter shows twelve feet of water,” he said loudly.

“Well, then, I reckon I must be sixteen feet tall,” the old fisherman said. “’Cause I get in my high boots and go clammin’ right here every Saturday low tide and four feet of me sticks outa the water.”

Macklin stared back at Vagabond’s instrument panel.

“Get the boat hook,” he ordered Jerry.

Olly slipped Lucy Mae’s throttle forward and eased the boat slowly ahead, against the tide and toward the left side of the big trimaran. It was almost dark.

“Careful of the sharks,” Captain Olly suggested quietly.

“What sharks?” Jerry asked nervously as he approached the side of the trimaran to test the depth.

“School of small sharks feedin’ here in the shoals. Better not put your hand too near the water.”

Lucy Mae was moving slowly ahead only a foot or two from Vagabond. Jerry looked uncertainly at the boat hook and then back at Macklin.

“You fellas sure you don’t want me to give you a tow out of here? Only cost you fifty bucks an hour.”

“Who the hell are you?” Macklin burst out and turned the spotlight on, sweeping the length of Lucy Mae and then holding it steady for a moment on the old man.

“Cap’n Oliver Mann,” the old man answered, flashing a toothless grin up into the light. “Cap’n Olly, they calls me. Just an old geezer tryin’ to earn a crooked buck. You want some Colombian pot? Or 1 can sell you this here bag of groceries cheap too. Cost only forty.”

“That’s twice what it must have cost you,” Macklin barked back, turning off the spotlight.

“Cost me yesterday,” the old man replied, still smiling. “Price tripled today. Be eight times that tomorrow, I reckon.” Lucy Mae bumped the side of Vagabond. “Hold this line, will ya, young fella?” Captain Olly tossed a mooring line to Jerry, who instinctively grabbed it and made it fast to a cleat on the forepart of Vagabond’s port cockpit.

“Let’s see your groceries,” Macklin said, coming over to stand beside Jerry, his big gun clenched in his right hand.

“It’s right here, sonny,” the old man said amiably, turning on his flashlight and pointing it at the bag of groceries.

“Hand it up here and let us have a look,” Macklin said.

“I ain’t got enough strength in my back to lift a teacup off a saucer,” Captain Olly said. “One of you young fellas’ll have to come aboard and haul it out.”

“Hand it up here,” Macklin repeated.

“I tell you, sonny, my back won’t take it.”

“I’ll get it,” said Jerry.

“No,” said Macklin, suddenly pulling Jerry back from the rail. “There’s something wrong about all this. Go get the .22.”

“Suit yourself, fella,” Captain Olly said indifferently, switching off the flashlight, which left everyone only barely visible in the dim red glow of Vagabond’s portside running light. “I’ve made a lot of money today towing sailboats. If you—”

“Raise your hands and climb up here,” Macklin snapped, crouching with his gun aimed at Olly, his eyes flicking nervously over the length of Lucy Mae. Jerry returned with Jim’s .22 and stood beside Macklin.

“Now what you want me—” Olly had started to protest when the forward hatch cover clattered onto the foredeck. Macklin swung his gun around and fired past Jerry, and two shots exploded from Neil’s gun. Macklin and Jerry disappeared behind the combing of the cockpit.

After the three sudden explosions in the darkness a silence descended on the two boats, which rocked gently side by side in the small swells. Vagabond, left untended, began swinging up into the wind, her sails fluttering as they luffed.

“Jerry?” Macklin called hoarsely from the other side of the trimaran.

The only answer was the rough hum of Lucy Mae’s idling engine and the gentle slapping of the sails. For twenty seconds, then thirty, no one spoke. Olly was crouched in his cockpit peering up at the vacant space where Macklin and Jerry had been standing. Neil stood with his head and shoulders out of the hatch, his gun aimed at the wheelhouse entrance, which he could just make out in the darkness. A small stream of blood crept down his left arm—pierced by splinters from Lucy Mae’s shattered hatchway.

“Your friend’s dead, sonny,” Captain Olly finally shouted. “Better come over here and give up.”

The silence resumed. Neil, feeling certain he had hit Jerry, pulled himself quietly out onto the deck and crawled over onto the foredeck of the trimaran; he felt Macklin must be in the opposite cockpit. He crawled swiftly across Vagabond’s entire width forward of the cabins and crouched on the foredeck on the opposite side from Lucy Mae.

Olly had felt his boat rock as Neil’s weight shifted to Vagabond, so he called out again to draw Macklin’s attention.

“We got four men here with automatic rifles, sonny!” he shouted. “Better get on over here with your hands held high.”

Macklin again didn’t respond. Peering aft, Neil couldn’t see his dim bulk crouched in the starboard cockpit as he had expected. Macklin must be close to Frank’s cabin hatchway. He wondered where Jim and Jeanne were. If Macklin were to take them as hostages, they were in trouble, but even so he didn’t dare risk his life now by rushing him. He crouched and waited to see the effect of the old fisherman’s propaganda campaign.

“Three to one ain’t good odds, sonny,” Olly’s high-pitched voice called out through the darkness. “If you’re not over here in the next minute, we’re going to come after you.”

Neil could still see no sign of Macklin and suddenly had the unnerving conviction that Macklin wasn’t there, that he, Neil, had miscalculated again. He glanced down behind him into the water, then over to the other cockpit, but nothing moved. He strained his eyes again to see some sign of Macklin in the starboard cockpit, strained his ears to pick up the slightest movement.

“I surrender.”

The words, spoken quietly, reached Neil from the area he’d been so desperately searching.

“I’m throwing my gun across the top of the cabin,” Macklin continued. Something clattered across the cabin top.

“Come over here with your hands behind your head,” Olly shouted. A flashlight suddenly lit up the wheelhouse from Lucy Mae’s cockpit. Macklin abruptly appeared in the light, his empty hands behind his head, moving slowly. He had to step over something before he emerged into the center of Olly’s light in the cockpit near Lucy Mae. As Neil glided over the cabin tops Frank came up over Vagabond’s combing and picked up the .22.

“We’ve got him, Neil,” he called, holding the .22 on Macklin.

When Neil arrived, he saw Frank and Macklin staring down at Jerry, who lay in a pool of blood, his open eyes fixed.

“I told him not to do it,” Macklin said quietly. “But he said you were going to kick us off.”

Frank and Neil stared at him.

“I got that puller tool you asked for,” he said to Neil.

As Frank broke away to throw back the port hatch to search for Jeanne, Neil watched Macklin.

“Are any of our people hurt?” he asked coldly.

“Your people are all a lot healthier than Jerry.”

“They’d better be,” said Neil, and as he heard Jeanne’s voice, he began to feel relieved: Vagabond was theirs again.

An hour and a half later Vagabond lay at anchor, Lucy Mae still tied to her port side. After the initial exhilaration and the relief of being reunited, those aboard were in various states of disorientation and exhaustion. Jeanne, Jim, and Lisa had all been hurt resisting the taking of Vagabond, and Neil during its rescue. Jim had bruised ribs, a bloody nose, and cut and sore wrists where they had bound him.

Jeanne’s left cheek had a swollen and bluish bruise where Macklin had hit her when she’d tried to help Jim. When Lisa had begun pounding on Macklin’s back, Jerry had struck her on the side of the head with the butt of his gun. Neil had a two-inch-long, half-inch-wide wood sliver lodged in his left arm. Conrad Macklin had examined Lisa’s head right after her injury and again when Vagabond had been sailing away and had told Jeanne that Lisa probably had a minor concussion but no fracture. He offered now to pull out the splinters from Neil’s arm, but after first refusing, Neil soon concluded that Jeanne and Frank were being too gentle in their probing. He finally let Macklin coolly butcher the splinters out.

Later, after tying Macklin’s hands behind him and then to the mizzenmast and leaving Jim on guard, they buried Jerry at sea. Jeanne came up on deck and saw Neil, Frank, and Olly standing in the dim light of the wheelhouse with Neil reading in a low voice from the Bible. She stood momentarily mesmerized by the weird scene, which continued as Neil stopped reading and he and Olly lifted the body up and slid it overboard. The whole experience was so unreal, so disconnected from her previous life, that she staggered down the steps to the main cabin for the reassuring sight of pots, pans, a kitchen— anything to erase the eeriness of those three dim figures in the cockpit, like warlocks chanting some incantation, and then throwing a body into the sea.

She prepared coffee, not because anyone had asked her to, but to ground herself, to reestablish everyday reality. When Frank came down, he looked anxiously at Jeanne and came over to take her in his arms again. His white sport shirt was sweat-stained and grimy, his gray hair slick with sweat. He had embraced her after the initial rescue, and she had clung to him as a brother or father, a haven from the insane chaos that was raining down upon her.

“Coffee or scotch?” Jeanne now asked Frank. Captain Olly was already sipping at a cup full of scotch—caffeine being “bad for the teeth.”

“Both,” Frank replied and sat down with a great sigh on the settee opposite Olly, who had slumped over sideways and was soon snoring.

When Neil appeared, he paused with uncharacteristic uncertainty at the foot of the steps. He accepted a cup of coffee from Jeanne with a mechanical smile, his severe face showing none of the warm attentiveness that it had so often throughout the day.

“We should be getting under way,” Neil said to Frank, who was sitting with his back to him. Frank stared into the bronze glow of his whiskey and in a single swallow tossed it off. When Frank didn’t reply, Jeanne asked, “Where are we going?”

“It’s my judgment we should sail out the bay to the ocean,” Neil replied, looking at Frank’s back.

Frank turned on the transistor radio on the shelf above the dinette table and after a moment located a working station. As they all began listening to a radio report of the events of the day Jeanne exchanged a strangely conspiratorial glance with Neil and then sat down beside Frank, instinctively placing her hand on top of his.

The nuclear war was exactly one day old and already, although someone claimed both sides were showing “restraint,” every European country and most parts of the United States had been hit. The U.S. retaliation against the Soviet Union was described as if it were even more devastating than the blows the U.S. had received. A statement by the President indicated that the war would be fought to the bitter end, no matter what the consequences. The President had said that he expected every citizen to do all he could to support the American effort to punish the Soviet Union for its unprovoked criminal aggression. A state of martial law had been declared.

Finally Frank reached and turned off the radio.

“I couldn’t get to Norah,” he said to no one in particular.

“No planes available?” Neil asked.

“Nothing to pay with,” Frank replied. “I have no money.”

In the silence that followed, Jeanne became aware of Neil’s unanswered call to get going hovering over the room.

“What are we going to do now?” she asked Frank gently.

“I don’t know,” Frank answered.

“Macklin got hold of a puller,” Neil said, “and they loosened the old shaft. Jim and I should be able to put in the new one and get the prop on in less than an hour. Then we should sail south.”

Frank turned in his settee seat to look past Jeanne at Neil, who was still standing at the foot of the companionway steps.

“What about Bob?” he asked. “What about Captain Olly? What about the rest of the country?”

It seemed strange to Jeanne to hear someone asking about Bob. It was like an inquiry into another lifetime.

“Bob is dead,” she said automatically.

“The radioactive cloudbank from Washington is still spreading,” Neil went on. “The fallout from everywhere will get worse. I doubt we can survive unless we get east and south Fast.”

Seeing Frank’s haggard face Jeanne realized with a shudder that he was in a state of shock, that he was barely there. She saw a vague flash of irritation cross his face when Neil spoke, but no comprehension.

“Then… we should get under way,” she said softly and stood up. Looking back at Frank, she saw him turning to pour himself another small glass of whiskey.

“We’ve got new food supplies in Olly’s smack,” Neil said to her. “I’d like you and Olly to transfer them to Vagabond and then you can begin storing them.”

“All right,” she answered, aware of how gently Neil was speaking to her.

“We’re running away,” Frank announced in a low, husky voice.

“I hope so,” Neil snapped back.

“What else can we do?” Jeanne asked quickly.

Frank tossed off his second drink, slid himself sideways, and stood up.

“When I know, we’ll do it,” he said. “Hey! You!” he shouted at the sleeping fisherman, who awoke, startled and blinking.

“You want to join us on an ocean cruise?”

Captain Olly squinted dazedly at Frank “I got a son I want to see,” Olly replied, frowning.

“Well, then, you’ll have to shove off,” Frank said. “We’re only taking cowards and deserters.” He brushed past Jeanne and Neil and up the companionway. Neil and Olly followed.

“What are we going to do with this load of filth?” Frank asked, stopping to stare at Conrad Macklin, who was sitting at the foot of the mizzenmast with his arms tied behind his back. Jim was on a settee seat guarding him, a bandaged forehead and bluish bruise on his lower ribcage indicating his wounds.

“I’m sorry we stole your boat,” Macklin said unexpectedly.

“I say we dump him overboard,” Frank went on fiercely, turning to Neil. “I tried to get through to the Coast Guard to come arrest him, but the man on duty said we’d have to bring him in.”

“To where?” Neil asked.

“Their station at Crisfield.”

“We’re not wasting time going back there.”

“Throw him overboard.”

A silence followed. Macklin looked expressionlessly at Frank. When Jeanne came up into the wheelhouse, he turned to her.

“I’m sorry about your girl,” he said. “Jerry didn’t mean to hurt her. She’ll be all right though.”

“SHUT UP!!” Frank shouted, taking a step toward Macklin and flushing with anger.

“Ignore him, Frank,” said Neil. “Jim, get into your scuba gear. We’re going to put the new propeller shaft in.”

While Jim went forward to change, and Jeanne and Olly began transferring the food from Lucy Mae, Frank sat down and put his face in his hands. Neil stayed where he was, facing Macklin.

“I panicked,” Macklin went on quietly, his eyes as expressionless as always. “Jerry was convinced that without food you were going to kick us off the boat before we’d cleared the Chesapeake. When I got back with that puller, he’d already taken over the boat without me. Ask Jim.” He looked up at Neil with an anguished expression that Neil couldn’t quite believe was genuine. “Take me with you. I can help.”

Frank erupted from his seat and grabbed Macklin by the throat, sending his head crashing back against the mizzenmast.

“Shut up! You stupid bastard!” he shouted. “You say another word, and I’ll kill you!”

Neil pulled Frank away.

“Help Olly and Jeanne,” he said to him quietly.

For a moment Frank stood looming over Macklin; Neil could feel him trembling.

“I can’t stand that kind of talk,” Frank said, finally moving away. “A man steals my boat, hits a woman in the face, has his crony almost kill Lisa, and expects us to forgive him. Jesus!”

As he led his friend over toward Lucy Mae, Neil couldn’t respond. It was disturbing to remember that he himself had been perfectly ready to steal a boat to go chase after Vagabond. And would he have let Macklin and Jerry stay if he hadn’t cleaned out that supermarket?

Now, left alone with Macklin, Neil knelt down to loosen the large removable section of decking that covered the engine. He took a flashlight out of the tool chest lying on the shelf above the engine to examine the position of the bent shaft.

“You need me, Captain Loken,” Macklin suddenly said to him in a whisper. “You need my medical skills. You need someone else aboard who’s got your cold will to survive. You can use me.”

Neil pushed himself back up to a kneeling position to look at Macklin in the dim light. Macklin was staring at him serenely.

“The others have too much heart to survive in this world,” Macklin went on. “You can use me, you know it. I didn’t want to take this boat. I can’t sail. Without Jerry I’m not about to turn pirate again.”

Neil looked back at him expressionlessly.

“Despite your cold will to survive,” he said, “the helpless people with too much heart have you tied to a mast and are getting ready to throw you overboard.”

Jeanne and Frank came into the wheelhouse carrying bags of groceries and disappeared into the main cabin.

“You know Frank won’t kill me,” Macklin whispered. “That woman wouldn’t let him. Only you are strong enough and cold enough to kill me, but you need another man like me. And you need a doctor. You know it.”

“With you around we’ll damn well need somebody’s medical skills,” Neil said.

When Jim came into the wheelhouse, dressed in his wetsuit, Neil stood up.

“If Frank agrees, we’re dumping you ashore at the first opportunity,” he said aloud to Macklin.

“I’m a fighter, Loken,” Macklin said in a normal voice. “You need another fighter.”

“I can use your .45,” Neil replied, nodding to Jim to pick up the new shaft. “The rest of you, no. Let’s get to it, Jim.”

Because she felt herself moving in a dream from which she might momentarily awaken Jeanne was partially detached from all she did. The pedestrian act of bringing groceries into the galley was slightly unhinged when she had to pass by the dark figure of Macklin, bound to the mast whispering to Neil. Later she could hear Neil and Jim grunting and swearing as they worked on the engine shaft, and as she traipsed to and fro between the two boats, she became aware that around Vagabond was a vast darkness. There were no lights to be seen now in any direction, and although stars shone above them, the whole northwestern quarter of the sky was ominously dark. She had managed to put away almost half the food in the galley when the propeller shaft was finally fixed, the engine tested, and the sails raised again. With the men shouting to each other on the deck above her, Olly poked his head into the galley and said an awkward good-bye. In another moment she felt the steady hiss of water along the sides of the hull at her feet; the anchor was up and they were sailing.

And then, in a casual, almost routine way, the nightmarish side of her dreamworld returned again. They had been sailing no more than a minute or two, and she was still working in the galley, now lit by a kerosene lamp, when the .companionway to the wheelhouse, which had been dark, was filled with light. She heard Neil shout “Don’t look!” and a moment later Frank’s voice: “Get the sails down!”

She braced herself, expecting the boat to be hit as her car had been by the force of the blast. She heard and felt feet thudding across the cabin roof and again Frank’s voice shouting something to Jim. The sails began to flutter and snap as they did when the boat came up into the wind. She still crouched by the galley stove, her teeth clenched, her hands clutching the counter top.

A screeching sound cut into the flapping sails—were the sails being lowered?—and then Neil’s face appeared in the cabin entranceway.

“Batten everything down!” he shouted. He started to leave but, catching her blank expression, he turned back. “Big waves may be hitting us from the blast. Store everything where it can’t get loose and fly around.”

As she began putting the dishes and remaining groceries away helter-skelter into drawers and cabinets, Jim leapt down into the cabin.

“I’ll help,” he said and, kneeling, pushed back the carpet and removed a section of the floor. “We’ll store the rest of the food in the bilge for now,” he added.

By the time they had stowed everything away in the main cabin and come back up into the wheelhouse, the glow to the south—over Norfolk, Jim told her—was large and growing, but not as bright as the blast over Washington had been. The sails were lashed down, and the boat headed slowly north under power, its diesel engine barely audible.

When Jeanne checked Lisa and Skippy, she was surprised to see that someone had tied them into their berth to prevent them from falling out: two half-inch lines across the top of the blanket attached to fittings in the far wall and at the edge of the berth near the cabin walk space.

“Hold on, Jeanne!” she heard Frank shout, and then came a hissing, swishing sound growing closer. She grabbed the handrail of her own berth just as Vagabond was struck by noisy, moiling wash of water. The breaking waves threw Vagabond forward, swinging Jeanne around and slamming her into the wall beneath her berth.

But that was all. The rushing sound continued and Vagabond seemed to be surging and rocking, but the blow seemed to have been relatively harmless. Her children didn’t even awaken.

Back up on deck she saw Frank, looking grim, handling the wheel and looking to his right, where she could see another boat, Lucy Mae, easing alongside. With Neil and Jim assisting, the two ships were tied together again, both moving slowly forward.

“I came back for dessert,” Olly said to her from his cockpit and smiled an elfin smile.

Neil returned to the wheelhouse.

“We ought to make for deeper water,” he said to Frank.

“You think there’ll be more waves like that?” Frank asked.

“In two or three hours there may be some huge waves,” Neil replied gravely. “The water around the blast area will have been hit with tremendous force and sent rolling up the bay. These little things that are hitting us now must be from the local shock wave.”

“How much time do we have?” Frank asked.

“If the waves are moving at twenty to thirty knots, probably about two hours. Maybe more.”

“In that time we could get ourselves into the lee of Tangier Island,” Captain Olly said.

“That would be good,” said Neil.

“Let’s do it,” agreed Frank.

Neil and Olly were both frowning over at Lucy Mae.

“Olly,” Neil said. “Vagabond’s made for big seas, but the Lucy Mae will be swamped and sunk if the big ones hit before we make the lee of the island. I think you ought to anchor and come with us.”

“How much warning you figure we’ll get?” Olly asked.

“If this light holds, we should be able to see big waves coming from quite a distance… about a minute’s warning,” Neil answered. “But Christ, Olly, we can’t know even that for sure.”

Olly nodded.

“Why don’t we both go side by side,” he said. “I’d like to try to make it.”

“Okay,” agreed Neil. “Stay close to leeward. If we see danger, we’ll signal with the air horn and turn due north, away from the waves. You get over here and board us. Figure you have about thirty seconds. Why don’t we send Jim with you to help you get ready to abandon ship if the time comes?”

“Sounds fine to me, sonny,” Olly said. “How big you figure these waves’ll be?”

“Too big,” Neil replied.

The two vessels were soon speeding through the rough water, thirty feet apart, headed northwest to take shelter behind the northern end of Tangier Island, fourteen miles away. Jeanne could see Lucy Mae rolling and pitching in the short, steep waves sent northward by the local shock waves. Vagabond’s motion was less pronounced, since her three hulls made her more like a huge sailing raft, but the waves still smashed into the port hull with ominous crashing sounds.

After she became queasy while preparing some hot tea in the galley, Jeanne remained in the wheelhouse. Frank was steering while

Neil with the binoculars was keeping a lookout south for the anticipated larger waves.

It must have been something like two hours later—Jeanne had fallen asleep on the settee—with the two boats still running side by side, and now only a half-mile from Tangier Island and nearing the protection of its northern tip, that Frank’s shout awakened Jeanne.

When she sat up, she saw Neil, at the helm, grab the air horn and shoot out four loud blasts. Frank, with the binoculars, ran into the cabin and stood beside him.

“It’s a wall of water!” he shouted.

“Help Olly and Jim get aboard,” Neil shouted back, glancing to his right, where Lucy Mae was already approaching. “Jeanne! Get below!”

But she simply took hold of one of the wooden supports of the wheelhouse roof and looked back at him dumbly.

“Untie me!” Macklin said fiercely, but Neil, ignoring him, slowed Vagabond down slightly to permit Lucy Mae to come up alongside. Jim threw an armful of fishing gear into the cockpit and then went back for more. Olly handed something to Frank and shouted to Jim to get off. Frank was trying to hold the two boats together as they rolled and smashed into each other’s sides while Olly turned back to the wheel and tied a line to one of its spokes. When Jim had thrown the last of Lucy Mae’s salvageable gear onto the trimaran and boarded, Olly jumped aboard Vagabond, tugging on the line. Lucy Mae, still under power, swung away and veered off at a right angle into the darkness.

“Damn pretty boat,” Olly commented as he watched her go.

All the hatches and door slides had been put in place earlier, and now everyone except Neil crouched in the wheelhouse, looking aft through the Plexiglas window at the low wall of water rising up out of the horizon behind them, the wall made visible by the huge hill of light that filled the low southern sky from the explosion over Norfolk.

“Untie me!” Macklin pleaded to Jeanne, who just looked past him at the approaching water.

Neil had opened Vagabond’s throttle up all the way, and Vagabond rushed forward, away from the tidal wave at over nine knots, but the wall still grew toward them, and they clearly heard a roaring sound as the wave smashed along the shore of Tangier Island. Neil had swung the boat slightly toward the island, but when the wave was only a hundred feet away he turned back to present Vagabond’s stern directly to the racing sea.

The first wave was over twenty feet high, a mound of water rather than a wall, a cap of white froth bubbling down its forward side. The roaring noise grew louder, the wave grew immense, and then was upon them, first lifting Vagabond’s stern, then burying it as it struck at her three hulls, a river of water ten feet high rushing across the whole boat, smashing through the rear of the wheelhouse, hurling the trimaran forward at twice her previous speed, leaving Olly, Jim, Jeanne, and Frank in a heap against the wall and hatch slide of the main companionway and tangling Olly in Neil’s feet as he stood clutching the wheel.

Jeanne, crushed up against the cabin wall by the cold salt water swirling over her, choked and gasped as she struggled upward in a nightmare of drowning, clawing at the wall as the water still seemed to be pinning her down. Frank grasped her arm and pulled her, sputtering, up into his arms and wedged himself against the control panel shelf.

The water was up to her knees, and she assumed that they were sinking, but then she saw Neil looking back over his shoulder with a look of concentration devoid of dismay. The roar was still all around them and she felt they must be hurtling through the water at some fantastic speed, but even as she thought this, she saw that Neil was actually gunning the throttle.

“We’ll anchor behind Tangier Island just as we planned,” he shouted. “It’ll take us awhile to pump her out and clean up.”

The water had already fallen to her ankles, some of it pouring into the main cabin through the broken hatch slide and the rest draining out the holes of the self-bailing cockpits and wheelhouse.

Jim crawled forward to prepare the anchor, while Frank stared at the smashed fragments of plywood, Fiberglas, and Plexiglas that had been the back wall of his wheelhouse.

“Not too many boats going to be floating after that ripple,” Olly said to Neil with an uncharacteristically grim expression.

“Check our main bilge, Olly.”

“Jesus, what’s the use,” said Frank. “Every time we—” “Go check your starboard cabin bilge,” Neil interrupted. “Jeanne, check your children. We’ve survived.”

Vagabond had had ten tons of water sweep over her, had shipped over half a ton in her three bilges from stove-in windows and hatch slides, the wheelhouse rear wall was reduced to splinters, but all her rigging had come through intact. In another half-hour they had pumped or bailed out most of the uninvited water and were anchored behind what was left of Tangier Island. They set up a rotation of two-hour watches and, numb, shell-shocked, exhausted to the point of not caring, all at last were permitted to sleep.

Neil didn’t waken until nine o’clock the following morning and thus had five full hours’ sleep, a luxury after the previous forty-eight. As he emerged from his damp cabin he felt anxious and irritated. In the daylight he saw clearly for the first time the extent of the damage to the rear wall of the wheelhouse, saw Olly’s gaffs, fishing nets, oyster tongs, and other gear still lying in a heap in the starboard cockpit, saw the smashed cabin hatch slide, saw Frank sprawled asleep on one of the wheelhouse settees—it was Frank’s watch—and felt a strong breeze blowing, now out of the north. The thought that they had been sitting still doing nothing for almost seven hours rankled him, and he had to stop on the afterdeck to calm himself down.

But as he gazed around the bay his irritation and impatience gave way to an entirely different emotion. A house was floating only a hundred yards to the east; on the shore of Tangier Island were the remnants of several wrecked houses and boats. On the island itself not a single building seemed to remain standing. Farther to the south was the now-familiar ghastly gray mass squatting in the otherwise clear blue sky like an ugly, swelling toad. However much he was displeased by the current condition of Vagabond, she was afloat; she had survived.

As he stepped down into the starboard cockpit to begin work he stopped. Where was Macklin? He’d been left tied to the mizzenmast. Neil leapt down into the starboard cockpit, ran into the wheelhouse, and then stopped: Macklin was sitting nonchalantly in the sun of the opposite cockpit, sipping coffee. Jeanne emerged from the main cabin and behind her he saw Lisa at the galley stove.

“Good morning,” she said.

“How’d he get loose?” Neil asked grimly.

Jeanne flushed in response to Neil’s unconcealed anger.

“He was free when I got up,” she replied. “Can I fix you something for breakfast?”

Neil walked farther into the port cockpit and saw with a start that the .22 was lying across Macklin’s knees.

“Good morning,” said Macklin neutrally.

“May I have the rifle?” Neil asked.

“Sure,” said Macklin. “It’s of no use to me.” He put his coffee cup down on the seat beside him and handed the .22 to Neil. “But look, Loken, let me sail with you. Putting me ashore would be murder.”

“How did you get loose?” Neil asked quietly, noting that the .22 he had taken from Macklin was loaded.

“Child’s play,” Macklin replied with a sneer.

“Why didn’t you take the dinghy and escape?”

“Escape, shit,” Macklin snapped. “There’s no escape out there. My only chance—I admit it’s smaller than a flea’s cock,” he added parenthetically, glancing to his left at the blast cloud over the Norfolk area, “is on this ship.”

“Are you all right?” Neil asked Jeanne.

“Yes. I thought you had released him.”

He nodded, grimacing.

“Would you like to eat now?” Jeanne asked again.

“Thanks,” Neil answered. “Use whatever’s in the refrigerator first—bacon, cheese, other things that will spoil when we turn off the propane to conserve it for cooking. Don’t cook potatoes, for example.”

“Fine,” she said, disappearing down into the galley.

“Cook for everyone,” he called after her. As he looked down into the galley he was pleased to see that although the area was a mess, it was a functioning mess: Jeanne and Lisa had removed all the food from the bilge, where some of it had been spoiled by the previous night’s deluge, and were inventorying and stowing it away. He noted too that Jeanne and her two children were dressed as neatly as for a quiet summer cruise, their white shorts and blouses in curious contrast to the big bluish bruise on Jeanne’s cheek and the bloody bandage on the side of Lisa’s head. Skippy was looking shyly up at him, clinging to one of his mother’s bare thighs.

“Can you keep an eye on Skippy for me?” Jeanne called up to him.

“Of course.”

But Skippy didn’t need an eye kept on him, since he was content to stay with his mother down in the main cabin, clinging to her as if she were safe space in a game of tag. He ignored her suggestion that he go up with Neil to look at a comic book and limited his conversation to periodic announcements to his mother: “I’m hungry.”

Lisa came up to where Neil was examining the wrecked wheelhouse wall to hand him a cup of coffee. The bandage on the left side of her face was immense and had a blot of red in the middle, but she told him that though it hurt and throbbed, she felt no dizziness.

“Here comes somebody,” she added unexpectedly, squinting off to the northeast.

Following her gaze, Neil turned to see a small skiff motoring at full throttle toward them, a man standing up in the stern, steering. Neil picked up the .22 again and cradled it in the crook of his elbow. At first he assumed the man was headed toward the village of Tangier, but the skiff kept coming straight in and coasted to a halt alongside the starboard hull. A small, deeply tanned young man about Jimmy’s age wearing dirty khakis and a soiled cotton sweatshirt looked over Vagabond’s combing at them.

“My father here?” he asked.

“Who’s that?”

“Cap’n Olly.”

“He’s sleeping in the forepeak, I think.”

“Hey, pa! Pa! It’s Chris!” the young man shouted.

After a moment the captain poked his head out of the forward hatch and then came up on deck, his sparse white hair disheveled; he was dressed only in T-shirt and underdrawers.

“Well, you don’t have to shout about it,” he grumbled, looking aft, and seeing Lisa standing twenty feet away staring at him, he disappeared below to get his trousers on.

“’Pears you had some waves come visiting last night,” Chris said to Neil, nodding solemnly at the wrecked wall of the wheelhouse.

“We did,” Neil agreed. “How about you?”

“Well, most of the houses on Smith Island are a few hundred feet farther north than they used to be, and there aren’t many people left to give a damn.” Chris glanced to his right. “Tangier must have really got socked.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Good morning, ma’am,” Chris said to Jeanne, who had come up into the wheelhouse.

“Good morning.”

“Well, what you want?” Captain Olly asked when he came out on deck a second time, buttoning up his pants. “Getting so a man can’t even escape his own family out at sea.”

“I was worried about you, pa,” his son said. “They said you went chasing pirates or something, and then the tidal wave last night, and you didn’t come back.”

“Well, I’m back,” he said. “Got myself two pirates. Woulda gotten more, but there weren’t none.”

“Where’s Lucy Mae?”

“I sent her into Crisfield to pick me up some pipe tobacco.”

Chris looked at his father uncertainly.

“We had to cut her loose when the big wave was about to hit,” Neil explained. “I imagine she sunk.”

“You okay?” Chris asked his father.

“Course I’m okay. I been dying for two years now, and chasin’ pirates and dodging tidal waves ain’t gonna affect it none. What you been up to? You remember the mayonnaise?”

“I’m going in the Navy, pa.”

“What do you mean you’re going in the Navy?” the old man demanded, sitting now on the cockpit bench near his son and pulling on his socks. “Why you want to go in the Navy?”

“Because I have to,” Chris answered.

“How have to? Why have to? What are you talking about?”

“The President ordered us to,” Chris answered quietly. All reservists had to go. I’m taking a special bus this morning at eleven from Salisbury.”

“What’s the hurry?” Captain Olly said irritably. “Navy got a ship needs bailing out this afternoon?”

“I’ve got to go, pa,” Chris insisted.

Captain Olly stood up and looked out across the afterdeck toward Smith Island. He stood silently for almost half a minute while his son watched him patiently.

“Well,” the old man finally said. “Give me a good-bye kiss. Ain’t every day a son goes put-putting off to get himself blown to bits.” He took a step toward his son and presented his grizzled cheek. Chris kissed him awkwardly. Captain Olly straightened up but kept looking down at his son.

“One of them H-bombs come after you, you remember to get below,” he said.

“You know me, pa,” Chris said, smiling boyishly. “If I know one’s coming, I’ll want to come up on deck to get a look at it.”

“Know you will, son, know you will. I figure in another week you’ll come raining down into the Atlantic.”

Chris stared at him.

“Don’t mind me, son,” Olly said, tears glistening in his eyes. “I just wish you’d a stole a boat and sailed into the Atlantic like a respectable son would do. Or at least a live one.”

“I’m going, pa.”

“I know you are, but I’m not going to stop talking. You’re just gonna have to go, ’cause I ain’t letting you go. ’F I had my druthers, I’d stay here talking to you till this boat rotted and sank. I like your face, son, and the damn sky’s gonna be empty without it.”

“Good-bye, pa,” Chris said, and gave his skiff a gentle shove away from Vagabond and pulled the starting cord on his outboard. The engine purred into life.

“I know you’re going, son, but you can’t stop me from talking to you. I been talkin’ to you eighteen years, and I ain’t gonna stop now just ’cause you want to go rushing off to become a smithereen. The world’s full of smithereens these days, and I don’t see why you think one more’s gonna make the air smell any purtier, ’specially you smelling most the time like a blowfish after flies been at it a week. Why I remember when you…”

His son was already fifty feet away, the sound of the skiff’s engine buzzing gently back to them across the water and beginning to fade.

Captain Olly, tears dampening both cheeks, turned to look at Neil and Lisa and Jeanne, who had been watching Chris’s departure from the wheelhouse. After several seconds delay he snorted.

“You got breakfast ready yet, lady?” he suddenly blurted at Jeanne. “I gotta get some eggs and coffee aboard my belly before I swamp us again with my dribble. Got any that whiskey left there, cap’n? I’m eighteen.”

The three stared at him.

“Nine o’clock in the morning and I ain’t even pissed yet,” he went on. “You got a head aboard this boat or can I pee off the side or use a bucket like real sailors do?”

“Off the afterdeck is fine,” Neil answered.

“Would you like some bacon and eggs?” Jeanne asked.

“Course I’d like bacon and eggs,” Captain Olly said as he stepped up out of the cockpit to get to the afterdeck. “And toast and juice and potatoes and anything else you got cooking. A dying, orphaned man got to make the most of his last days. Least he can do is eat like a pig.” Turning his back to the ladies, who went below to make breakfast, Captain Olly pissed with dignity off the aft deck.

It was thirty minutes later, after they had all finished eating breakfast and begun coasting down the bay, that Neil, on his way forward to check the genoa, placed one foot onto the little step built into the cabin wall and stopped. He stared at the cockpit deck. A thin, barely visible layer of something lay on the cockpit floor. He bent over and ran an index finger for a few inches along the deck and looked at it: a gray smudge. He looked up at the sky above him. A thin haze marred the blue summer sky. He went quickly over to the opposite cockpit: the same thin layer of ash covered the deck around the fishing gear and other salvage from Lucy Mae.

He felt trapped. To the south lay a thick cloud over Norfolk; to the northwest the closer, more diffuse gray fog from the blast over Washington. And on the deck at his feet the first radioactive fallout.

“Frank!” he shouted.

Still bleary-eyed from weariness, Frank left the wheelhouse and stumbled to the cockpit.

“We’ve got fallout on deck,” Neil told him in a quiet voice.

Frank reached down to examine the ash, and then looked back at Neil.

“Everybody should go below,” he said. “I’ll wash the fucking stuff off the decks.”

Frank and Neil sent everyone into the main cabin and ordered them to shut all windows and portholes and check for ash, wiping off and throwing overboard any they found. Since every thickness of material between them and the radioactive fallout would give some small additional protection, Skippy was put on the floor underneath the dinette table and a jury-rigged wall of plywood was used to create a cave. The table was covered with blankets and sleeping bags from the forepeak. Jeanne ordered Lisa to crawl under it too. Olly suggested Jeanne make a space next to the dagger board well and beneath the crossbeam for greater protection. Conrad Macklin went into the forepeak and covered himself with bagged sails.

On deck Frank began washing down the boat with buckets of sea-water and a long-handled brush. Neil disappeared for a while and then emerged wearing full foul-weather gear, including rubber boots and a hood tied tightly around his face as if he were about to go out in a gale. He handed a full set to Frank and took over the washing down of the boat while Frank put on his gear. Jim had checked the genoa, and when he came aft, Frank ordered him below with the others. He and Neil would stay on deck.

As they set sail down the Chesapeake for the Atlantic a low-level dread hung over all of them as they huddled in the main cabin. They talked in low voices, like mourners at a wake. On the horizon to both north and south lay the ugly gray cloud masses that seemed to be creeping up the sky to kill them. One was chasing down from the north, and they were sailing south into the one over Norfolk. There was no escape.

When Vagabond sailed past Tangier village Neil looked dully at the wreckage. Two large fishing trawlers lay on their sides among the shells of three houses tilted crazily, as if all five were some child’s toys carelessly cast aside. One of the buildings must have been the bar they had stopped at the night it all began, but even through his binoculars he couldn’t tell which building it was. He saw no sign of life.

To the east the shore was too distant to reveal what had happened, but as Vagabond sailed out into the middle of the Chesapeake, Frank sighted the capsized hulk of a motor yacht a quarter mile to starboard. Other floating vessels became visible, a sailboat sailing south like Vagabond, and two other boats coming from the direction of Norfolk. With a sense of foreboding, Neil realized that on the previous day the bay had been crowded with boats, thirty-five or forty when he’d been searching for the sight of the stolen Vagabond. Not many had survived the explosion and the tidal wave.

It was Frank who spotted the first corpse: a limp, wet lump of clothing floating face-down less than fifty feet from Vagabond’s course. Frank’s first instinct was to alter course to retrieve the body, but then he quickly realized that the last thing they needed aboard was a corpse. There would be more.

The two ships coming toward them remained close to the western shore and soon disappeared past them, headed up the Chesapeake to God-knew-where. That they had survived at all was a surprise. The sailboat on the same course as Vagabond disappeared into a cove or a river on the western shore. By late morning they seemed to be all alone on the vast expanse of the bay.

With a sense of dread and impotent anger Neil observed that enough dust would accumulate in a half-hour’s time to form a visible gray film. He and Frank alternated doing the cleaning work, both of them getting overheated and exhausted in their stifling foul-weather gear on the increasingly hot day. His face dripping with sweat, one of them would plod over the entire length and breadth of the boat with a big plastic bucket and the long-handled brush, dipping the bucket into the bay, pouring it across the deck, then rapidly brushing to push everything back into the water. When he was finished he would stumble back to the other man, at the helm, and without a break the other would take up the exhausting work.

At eleven thirty Frank collapsed on the foredeck. Neil rushed forward and dragged him back, loosening his foul-weather gear. He hoped it was only heat exhaustion, and he carried Frank below where he could be undressed and cooled off. Olly took Frank’s place, wearing his own foul-weather clothing. Macklin was ordered to take a turn next.

Forty minutes later Frank reappeared on deck, dressed again in full gear and ordered Neil and Macklin to go below, saying that if they rotated four men, none of them would get overheated again. Olly came up again to share the ordeal.

Down in the main cabin Neil was struck by the stuffy, close atmosphere and by the silence. The wet towels they’d used to cool Frank down were still draped over the galley shelves. Lisa and Skippy were squeezed into the “doghouse” under the dinette table, Jim was sitting back against the galley cabinets with a Styrofoam cooler and settee cushion on his lap, and Jeanne was huddled beside the dagger board well with a settee cushion covering most of her. Neil stripped off his foul-weather stuff and rubbed himself down with one of the wet towels. Macklin crawled into the forepeak cabin.

“Mommy says the rain has radioactive germs in it,” Skippy said suddenly, peeking his head out of his cave. “Did you see them?”

“One or two,” Neil answered. “I kicked them overboard.”

“Mommy says you’re washing them overboard,” Skippy corrected.

“She’s right.”

Lisa also peered out.

“Is it still falling?” she asked.

“A little bit probably,” Neil answered. “But we’re keeping the boat so clean, you can’t tell.” He knew better, of course. The stuff was still falling, although even Neil thought at a slightly slower rate, and though they were a lot better off here than on land, they were still being exposed, especially those who had to work on deck.

Jeanne crawled out from her hideaway.

“You should get under the crossbeam,” she said. “You’ve been exposed already much more than we have.”

He glanced at the space, then at her. He wanted to lie down and wanted to feel better protected.

“Can we both squeeze in there?” he asked, frowning.

“No,” she said. “But you go ahead.”

He hesitated, but the thought of being able to lie down won out over gallantry; he realized how exhausted he must be. He stepped over Jim’s legs, held Jeanne briefly as he passed her, and then crawled into her space. She covered him with her cushion and sat down beside Jim. Vagabond sailed on. Below, no one spoke.

It was at about two o’clock, after they had sailed twenty-four miles down the bay and to within forty miles of Norfolk, that they came upon the floating hulk of a charter fishing vessel and its passengers. There had no been no measurable fallout since Neil had gone below about an hour and a half before, so Frank had let Olly remain on duty with him rather than bring Neil up again. But when he saw the derelict he called down for Neil.

Frank had altered course when he saw the survivors waving frantically at him, and with a gloomy, doomed expression he now ordered Neil and Olly to prepare to pick them up. The hulk lay low in the water, its afterdeck crowded with fifteen to twenty people—men, women, and children—a seemingly random collection of those who had escaped the disasters of somewhere to blunder into the disaster of the explosion over Norfolk.

A large man with a blond beard emerged from the crowd to stand on the cabin roof and shout that they’d been swamped by a tidal wave and, with flooded batteries, were helpless. The two vessels rolled and pitched awkwardly in the swells, and when they were rafted together at last, their decks sometimes slammed together with a sickening crunch.

Frank surveyed the packed near side of the yacht, the dazed and anxious faces, all looking exhausted, many sick, some people with burned faces and singed hair, two or three women holding children, men elbowing their way in front of them, and he felt the same sense of despair he’d felt when Neil showed him the ash on the deck: he was trapped and about to be overwhelmed.

“We’re headed out into the Atlantic,” he shouted over to the other boat. “We can put you ashore at Cape Henry or take you out to sea.”

Frank saw that most of the fatigued and frightened faces looked at him without comprehension. A ship had come to rescue them; if he’d announced he was sailing to Hell, they still would have come aboard.

“Bring all your food!” Neil shouted, but no one seemed to pay attention. The men began to clamber over Vagabond’s combing like pirates boarding a ship they planned to plunder. Only Jim and Neil tried to help the weak and injured aboard.

A scream broke from the confusion, and a pale young blond woman was soon led sobbing into the wheelhouse, her right hand bloody; apparently it had been crushed between the two boats. Neil called down to Jeanne and told her to get Macklin and the ship’s first aid kit, and he had the woman sit down on a wheelhouse settee. Between sobs the woman kept calling for her cat and seemed as disturbed by its not being present as by her mangled fingers.

The big man with the bushy beard was the only one helping people to escape from the foundering Fishkiller, and when Frank yelled again to bring all their food and water, he ducked down into the ship’s cabin and soon began passing cartons of food across to Jim.

A dog snarled at Jeanne when she brought up the first aid kit, and Neil had an impulse to throw the stupid beast into the sea. Macklin followed, wearing a raincoat. Neil could hear someone retching loudly off the afterdeck and smelled vomit.

As Macklin bent to examine the woman’s hand two men began scuffling behind him and one fell against Neil, knocking him into the seated woman, who screamed in pain. The two men, arms locked around each other in a violent wrestling match, reeled against a young couple and child on the opposite settee and then bounced off them onto the wheelhouse floor.

Macklin jumped up and grabbed them both by their hair, yanked hard, and shouted at them to let go. In another half-minute he and Neil had separated them.

It took almost fifteen minutes before the sixteen survivors and skimpy food supplies of Fishkiller had been transferred to Vagabond. At last the two ships separated, Vagabond’s genoa ballooning out to port with a flutter and a loud pop, and the derelict wallowing in the swells behind her.

The new passengers were scattered in listless confusion throughout the two cockpits, wheelhouse, and main cabin. Dressed in suits, slacks, jeans, bathrobes, and bathing suits were two elderly men, five women, three children, one of them an infant, and six able-bodied men. Neil was aware of at least one dog and cat aboard, but in the chaos it seemed like a dozen. Suitcases, knapsacks, and shopping bags were also strewn around underfoot.

After Vagabond had been sailing on southward toward the mouth of the Chesapeake for several minutes, the big man with the beard who seemed to have been their leader came up to Frank, who was at the helm. He had removed his foul-weather jacket and boots, but still was wearing the red plastic pants.

“My name’s Tony Mariano,” the man announced loudly. “Where the hell are you heading?” He was dressed in blue jeans and a silk shirt and fancy leather loafers. He was a powerfully built man in his late twenties, and he loomed at least a couple of inches over Frank.

“We’re headed out to sea,” Frank replied.

“You’re not taking us past Norfolk, are you?” the man persisted. “That’s right into the fallout.”

“That’s our plan,” Frank replied uncertainly.

As he watched Macklin work on the woman’s crushed fingers Neil was aware that two couples in the wheelhouse were listening intently to the conversation; even the woman he was treating seemed to forget her pain for the moment.

“The law of the sea,” Frank went on in a tense voice to Tony, “says that anyone rescuing shipwrecked survivors can either continue on to his scheduled next port, or put them ashore at the nearest point they find convenient. We—”

“I don’t give a fuck about the laws of the sea,” Tony broke in. “We’re not sailing into a rain of death.”

“That’s right,” another man said, coming up to the wheel. “Some of us are sick already. We can’t take any more radioactivity.” A teenage boy, an older man, and two women now gathered near Frank too. As Neil watched he could feel his anger rising.

“What’s going on?” another man asked, pushing his way past Neil.

“This man is taking us south back into the fallout,” Tony answered loudly.

“If you like—” Frank began.

“I thought we were going north,” the second man said.

“I did too,” the elderly man said. “Away from the explosion.”

Several additional voices made noises indicating that they agreed. Frank stood frowning.

“But in the north—” he began again.

“Who owns this boat anyway?” Tony asked, looking around aggressively as if someone were trying to put something over on him.

“I do,” Frank replied. “And I—”

“Well, get us turned around before it’s too late.”

A chorus of “Yeahs” resounded after Tony’s remark.

Neil slid away from the crowd and found Olly organizing the suitcases and knapsacks in the port cockpit.

“Go get the .38 that’s hidden in my aft cabin,” he whispered to him, “and be ready to back me up. Tell Jim to get the .22.”

Olly nodded solemnly, and when he had gone, Neil descended into the main cabin. Two strange women and three children were seated at the dinette, and Jeanne and Lisa seemed to be waiting on them. Jeanne looked up intently at him as he entered.

“What’s happening now?” she asked anxiously.

“Chaos,” Neil answered. He walked past her and took Macklin’s .45 from its hiding place behind a short shelf of books. After checking the chamber he returned to the wheelhouse.

“I think we’d better head east, Neil,” Frank said to him nervously as he came up the steps. “These people think that—”

Neil’s gun exploded once with a deafening bang. All conversation ceased. He shoved the person nearest him and the others backed away too. Everyone in the wheelhouse and cockpits stared at Neil, who stood for a moment in the center of the crowd holding his .45 with the barrel just a few inches below his chin—where everyone could see it. He was feeling a strange mixture of desperation, fury, and determination. In his yellow foul-weather gear he looked strangely out of place among the crowd of refugees.

“All right,” he began in a loud, tense voice. “I want you all to listen, and I want you to get it.

“We’re at war, and I’m your commanding officer. I expect everyone here to obey me as if I were God incarnate, without hesitancy and without question. I’ve commanded regular Navy ships ten times this size, and I’ve been sailing boats like this for ten years. If anyone else on board feels he’s better qualified, he’d better speak up now.”

There was a silence, and when Neil felt some people begin to stir restlessly, he plunged on.

“Good,” he went on, still speaking loudly. “Frank Stoor, here beside me, who owns this boat, is first mate. You treat him as you would me. Captain Olly, the old fellow standing over there is second mate. And Jim, at the helm now, is third mate. They are the ship’s officers, and their word is law. If anyone willfully disobeys any of our commands, I will personally throw him overboard. Do you get it?”

No one spoke. Most were falling back into that listlessness they’d had before Tony stirred them up.

“Good,” said Neil after a pause, aware now of the sweat dripping down his face, of Frank staring at him uncertainly, of Tony looking at him with a mixture of fear and resentment.

“As captain I’m announcing that our course is through the fallout area around Norfolk and out into the Atlantic.”

A few groans greeted this statement, but Neil cut them off immediately.

“Shut up!” he shouted. “We’re heading south until I feel it’s safe to make a landfall. You may feel that we ought to have a democratic discussion of what we ought to do. I don’t give a shit how you feel. If you don’t like this policy, I’ll give you a life preserver and you can go in a different direction. You may decide later, when you’re out in the Atlantic, that you wish you’d never left land. Bitch among yourselves all you like, but obey. ”

“But what if—” someone began.

“Anyone who willfully disobeys one of my commands will be thrown overboard.”

When Neil paused again, no one spoke.

“You’re beginning to understand,” Neil went on more quietly. “Now for some commands. First of all I want all weapons—guns and knives with a blade longer than two inches—turned over to the ship’s officers immediately. These weapons will be returned to you when we part company. Anyone found with a weapon on his person or in his luggage ten minutes from now… will be thrown overboard.”

Silence.

“Second, I want this area around the wheel and around the winches kept clear. When an officer orders you to go sit someplace on the boat, you go sit there and don’t move without permission. Consider where he puts you to be your battle station.

“Thirdly, anyone who brought food aboard shall immediately contribute all of it to the ship’s stores. If you leave soon, it will be returned to you. We’re sharing our ship, our weapons, our water, our food, and our skills with you, and we expect you to do the same with us. Anyone caught hoarding a private stash of food or eating or permitting his or her children to eat any of the ship’s food not rationed out to them will be thrown overboard.”

Again Neil paused, aware that Jim was watching him.

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” a woman asked in a frightened voice.

“If a man has to piss, he goes to the leeward side of the boat and pisses into the bay,” Neil replied in the same loud, tense voice. “If you don’t know which side of the boat that is, you ask an officer. Knowing which side of a boat to piss off is what made him an officer in the first place.” Olly chuckled, but the others were too frightened or awed to respond.

“Ladies will piss in buckets provided in the side cabins. A mate will see to it that their contents are tossed overboard.”

“Aren’t there marine toilets?” someone asked.

“Yes, there are. But the animal species capable of landing men on the moon and blowing the world apart has yet to develop a marine toilet that doesn’t clog if you stare at it too long. While we’re this crowded and while we have more important things on our minds, we won’t use them.”

This time when he hesitated, Neil felt that he’d gotten his point across, but perhaps too strongly.

“I sound harsh,” he continued. “I intend to be harsh. I intend this ship and those remaining aboard it to survive. My experience has been that in life-or-death situations the traditional Navy way of doing things is the only one that works. This policy is not open to discussion. Are there any questions?”

The silence aboard Vagabond as she sailed serenely down the Chesapeake in the direction most people thought they didn’t want to go was uncanny. No one spoke. Most of those he looked at simply looked numb.

“What if we have to vomit?” an elderly man finally asked.

“If you feel seasick, go to the leeward cockpit and lean over the combing. Vomit to leeward.” Neil paused. “Anyone caught vomiting to windward will be… thrown overboard. Anyone who vomits to windward will be so covered with vomit, he’ll probably be happy to be thrown overboard.”

A few nervous giggles.

“All right,” Neil concluded. “All weapons and food to the ship’s officers. Anyone attempting to resist these commands will be shot. Olly, Frank, get the weapons first…”

“Jesus, Neil,” Frank said a half-hour later, when Vagabond was as calm and orderly as a concentration camp. “Don’t you think you were a little hard on them?”

“No,” Neil replied. “We’re all trying to survive. Everyone on this boat, everyone, will lie, steal, cheat, and kill in order to survive. That speech served one purpose: to let their survival instinct know that the first thing it has to consider is me and whatever promotes the survival of this ship.”

“It was nice of you to let me be first mate on my own boat.”

Neil looked at Frank with total seriousness.

“It wasn’t nice,” he said. “You deserve it.”

Frank stared at him.

“You bastard.”

“You’d better believe it,” Neil said coldly. “When I said everyone obeys my commands, I meant everyone.”

“I see.”

“I hope so.”

At seven that evening Neil had them anchored off the coast near Cape Charles and began ferrying refugees onto the beach with the inflatable dinghy. Neil had stated his intention of continuing south, passing within fifteen miles of Norfolk before making it out into the Atlantic, where they would remain until fallout conditions and radio reports indicated that they dared return to the U.S. coast. Three people asked to remain on Vagabond, including the man who had started all the fuss in the first place, Tony Mariano. The second volunteer was a woman named Elaine with a young child, and the third a small man named Seth Sperling.

Although Neil had the .45 tucked into his belt and had armed both Frank and Jim for the evacuation and the redistribution of food and weapons, the event proceeded more smoothly than had the boarding five hours earlier. Even Conrad Macklin went meekly when Neil ordered him to go with the very first group.

As he helped people down into the dinghy Frank became aware that some of those who were leaving were afraid now that they had made the wrong choice and wanted to remain on board, but when an elderly man hesitated and was clearly intending to ask to come back aboard, Frank brusquely ordered Jim to cast off and ferry the last group ashore. The beach was only fifty feet away and so ten minutes after the last trip ashore Vagabond’s inflatable had been pulled back up on deck and stowed and the ship was under way again.

When the sun set at eight-forty, they were still fifteen miles from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The wind was dropping and shifting as they neared the Norfolk-Portsmouth area, blowing now out of the northeast at only six or eight knots. With the tide against them now, they started up the engine.

After the sun was gone and with the half-moon not yet risen, the blackness that descended upon them was depressing. Fallout was appearing on deck again, and the only lights they could see were from fires still burning in the blast area, one in particular blazing up sporadically like hydrogen flares from a dying sun. All the navigational aids seemed to have been destroyed; the lights of the bridge-tunnel were gone. They had seen no traffic except for one tiny sailboat in the late afternoon; now at night they had seen no running lights at all. As they headed south toward the northern opening through the bridge causeway that would lead them out to sea it was as if they were the last ship on earth, sailing alone away from a doomed land into the unknown.

Leaving Olly alone at the helm, Neil joined Frank, Jim, and Jeanne in the main cabin for a conference. Although he had ordered each of them to try to sleep for a couple of hours, they all looked exhausted. The men hadn’t shaved and hadn’t changed clothes since the war had started. Jeanne’s white clothes were dirty, her eyes red from fatigue or weeping, and her bruised cheek still ugly.

When Neil spoke, his voice was noticeably softer than it had been whenever he’d spoken to anyone on deck. He quietly laid out his plan of three-hour watches, with three watch teams, one led by each of the mates. Frank would work with the newcomer, Seth Sperling, a shy man who wore glasses and seemed uncertain of himself; Olly with big Tony Mariano; and Jim with Lisa. The third new passenger, a young woman named Elaine Booker, was to stay with her three-year-old child below in Jeanne’s cabin. Olly and Seth would sleep in Neil’s aft cabin; Tony in the forepeak cabin; and Jim with Frank in Frank’s cabin. He himself would sleep on the aft settee of the wheelhouse so as to be always on call.

Neil said that the amount of radiation they’d been exposed to so far was insignificant, but Frank wasn’t certain whether he really believed that or was merely saying it for the sake of morale. Jeanne’s queasiness, Neil insisted, was simple seasickness.

When the meeting seemed to be over, Jeanne unexpectedly spoke up.

“I don’t know how serious you were, Neil, but I warn you that I’ll try to stop you from throwing anyone overboard,” she said softly.

Startled, Neil looked at her, then his severe face broke into a small smile.

“I’d have to throw you overboard too,” he said. “Then who would look after your children?”

Jeanne flushed with anger and Frank quickly cut in. “He’d have to throw me overboard too.”

Neil stopped smiling and shook his head.

“I never said how close to shore we’d be when I threw someone overboard,” he finally replied.

“Is that a promise?” Jeanne asked, looking directly at him.

“On the other hand,” Neil went on, “the traditional punishment for mutiny is death. I’m afraid that is the way things are done aboard ship.”

“Not my ship,” Frank said.

“Let’s agree then,” said Neil quietly, after a pause, “that if there is a case of willful disobedience, I’ll convene a court of inquiry composed of all the ship’s officers and let them decide on the appropriate response.”

Jim nodded, and then Frank did too.

“Jeanne,” Neil went on gently, “please leave the management of the ship to me.”

“Not when it involves the lives of my family.”

“Your family?” Neil asked uncertainly.

“I consider everyone who comes aboard this boat a part of my new family.”

Neil frowned.

“Then in that sense every decision I make involves your family.”

“Then I am involved.”

Frank was amazed at how serenely she stared back at Neil, her eyes glowing with rebellion.

“All right,” Neil finally commented. “I understand your concern. If I seem cruel or capricious, you may complain to me, and we’ll try to resolve it.”

“Thank you.”

“And if we don’t, I’ll throw you overboard.”

He grinned.

“Not if I have my butcher knife,” she rejoined, grinning back.

“I believe it,” Neil said, standing up to end the meeting.

Back on deck in the darkness, Neil realized that the passage through the causeway, or the remains of the causeway, was going to be difficult to locate. He had taken a bearing on Fisherman’s Island just before dark, but since then it had all been dead reckoning. Even after the half-moon had risen, there wasn’t enough light to see anything on the horizon except the line of fires to the southwest. They would be able to see objects in the water no more than sixty feet away. Their depthmeter confirmed that they were in the big ship channel, but this by itself would give little advance warning of the presence of the causeway or the rocks of its wreckage. Vagabond was making toward the causeway at only about four knots.

Frank was sick, either from radiation exposure or ordinary seasickness, so Neil had Jim take his place on watch with Tony Mariano. When he ordered Tony to wash down the decks again just in case, Tony went to it quickly and energetically and finished with sweat pouring down his face and into his bushy beard. “Hell of a way to make a living” was his only comment.

“I wish we could see something!” Jim exclaimed a few minutes later as the three men stood sweating together around the helm.

“Alter course twenty degrees to the east,” Neil ordered.

“What’s up?” Tony asked.

“We’re not going to see anything until we actually reach the causeway,” Neil answered. “This way, when we do reach it, we’ll know we’re to the north of the channel. How are your night eyes, Tony?”

“Damn good.”

“Go forward and stand at the bow as lookout. Keep an eye out not only forward but also to port and starboard.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Tony crawled forward in the darkness, and soon his huge form was visible against the distant horizon like a black sail bundle tied to the forestay. Neil ordered Jim up to wash down the aft sections of the boat and ordered Tony to do the bow again.

A half-hour later they had still seen nothing. Jim wondered aloud whether they’d miraculously sailed through a gap and not seen either side.

“Or maybe the whole causeway got blown to pieces,” he suggested.

“Object to starboard!” Tony shouted, and Jim dampened the throttle and put her into reverse, bringing Vagabond slowly to a halt.

Neil turned on the twelve-volt spotlight and swung it to the right where Tony was pointing. A huge chunk of metal and some pilings appeared to be sticking out of the water. Neil swung the light in a slow arc, almost a full circle, but nothing else was visible. Although Vagabond was now in neutral, the tide was carrying her backward away from the strange objects to their right. The depthmeter showed they were in thirty-five feet of water—most likely on the edge of the big ship channel.

“Ease her over closer,” Neil said to Jim, holding the spotlight on the huge protruding metal chunk, which seemed to get longer as they approached it. Slowly Jim maneuvered Vagabond to starboard and forward.

“Okay,” Neil said after a while. “Back her off.”

“What is it?” Jim asked, still not able to put the huge metal object and broken pilings into any coherent pattern.

“A sunken freighter.”

“Oh… wow.”

Jim backed Vagabond away and put her into neutral at Neil’s command.

“She was either sunk by the blast or may have hit the submerged causeway. All we can do is ease forward some more, but we may be near it or on top of it.” Neil left Jim to climb up on the cabin roof to see better.

It was ten minutes later that they spotted the causeway. It emerged in front of them like a long spit of land, which it was, as solid as the rocks that it was made of. Their spotlight revealed, however, that the roadway was shattered and dozens, even hundreds, of burned-out cars gleamed brightly in the ship’s spotlight. No living being responded to their presence.

Neil had Jim swing Vagabond to starboard, and they motored south about two hundred feet from the causeway, Neil and Tony watching for the break in the wall that separated them from the sea. The air was still, and the sight of the endless line of blasted cars, motionless bodies sometimes visible inside them, made the humid air seem even more oppressive. They were all in full foul-weather gear, except that Jim had pushed back his hood.

Tony spotted the end of the causeway first and shouted the information back to Neil, who still kept Vagabond’s heading due south, as if they were going to motor right past it. But when the changes of depth registered by the depthmeter indicated that they were definitely in the middle of the big ship channel, Neil was sure the gap hadn’t been created by the explosion.

“Take her through,” he said quietly to Jim. “And on the other side alter course to due east magnetic.”

“What about speed?” Jim asked.

“Slow her down to five knots. We don’t want to hit something now that we’re so close to getting out.”

As they began motoring through the opening—now the other end of the causeway was also visible in the spotlight off starboard—Jim became aware of the gentle swells of the open sea, lifting Vagabond’s bow like a mother’s gentle hand and then lowering it again, the ship pitching so gracefully that it was like a rocking cradle.

“What’s that?” Tony shouted, pointing now to his right.

When Neil swung the spotlight in that direction, something huge appeared to be thrashing around in the water, sending gigantic bubbles bursting up to the surface not far from the end of the causeway. As Neil held the light on it, they all stared until finally Jim realized what it must be: air escaping from a hole in the undersea automobile tunnel directly beneath them must be bubbling up to the surface. Neil shut off the light with a grim nod.

As Jim slowly altered course to due east, he smiled to himself with the excitement of breaking free. Except for the unlighted buoys, sunken ships, derelicts, fallout, and further explosions, it was all clear sailing from here, he thought almost gaily. Ahead of him he could see only darkness, Tony even now not visible.

Lisa came up out of the main cabin with three cups of water and handed one to Neil and another to Jim.

“Thanks, Lisa, we’re sweltering up here,” Jim said, smiling down at her. “But we’re out of the bay.”

“We’re in the ocean?” she asked him.

“Yep. And no new fallout either.”

Seth Sperling suddenly appeared in the darkness beside them.

“Where are we?” he asked, staring at the dark shape of the causeway still visible astern and off to port.

“That’s what’s left of the northern section of the causeway of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel,” Jim replied, looking forward to where he could just make out Tony crouching at the bow. “We’re out in the ocean.”

“And what’s that boat coming toward us?” Seth asked next, as casually as if they’d been in a crowded, well-lit harbor.

“What?” said Neil, wheeling to face where he saw the little man staring.

A motorboat without its running lights on, which must have been hidden on the seaward side of the causeway, was angling in at them from the darkness of the causeway.

“Get the guns!” Neil hissed at Jim. “Aft cabin. Lisa, get below. Tony!” He shouted forward to the dim figure at the bow.

“What’s up?” Tony asked as he began to amble back aft, stopping near the mast to retrieve the spotlight.

“A boat coming!” Neil snapped back. “May be pirates.”

Neil squinted into the darkness and suddenly saw the motorboat now only thirty feet away and closing fast, its big outboard motor now audible over Vagabond’?, diesel. When it was obvious that the smaller craft had no intention of standing off to identify itself, Neil threw the throttle full forward, and Vagabond slowly responded. Jim returned with the weapons.

“Keep the .22,” Neil whispered fiercely to Jim, taking Macklin’s .45, “and take the helm. Seth, can you use a pistol?”

Wide-eyed, Seth shook his head “No.”

“Then take it forward to Tony. Quick!”

Even as he spoke, he could see the motorboat was already only a few yards away, a twenty-footer with three or four men aboard. Neither boat was showing running lights, and the men on the motorboat had not hailed them or signaled to them in any way. Neil shouted at them but there was no answer.

Crouching in the wheelhouse doorway and certain of danger, Neil fired a warning shot above Vagabond’s combing and over the launch, which had now moved so close to Vagabond that he couldn’t have hit it from the wheelhouse if he’d tried. The thump as the launch careered into Vagabond’s port hull was both heard and felt.

“Get down, Jim!” Neil whispered, watching the combing for the outline of a human figure. He could still hear the roar of the outboard outside the line of his sight, less than fifteen feet away. Crouching down, Jim swung Vagabond sharply to starboard for the moment, tearing the two boats apart. The launch, speeding along on its earlier course, came in sight twenty-five feet off Vagabond’s port side, and Neil fired a second shot, this time to kill, but Jim had swerved back again, throwing off his aim. Feeling sure he hadn’t hit anyone, he watched tensely as the launch quickly closed on Vagabond, disappearing behind her combing.

“Stay below!” Neil suddenly shouted, fearful that Jeanne or Frank, awakened by the shots, might emerge right in the line of fire. Then, again acting instinctively, he ran in a crouch across the wheelhouse out into the opposite cockpit and crawled onto the deck beside the entrance to his aft cabin. As he stared through the blackness at Vagabond’s port side, he suddenly realized that the motorboat had dropped back into Vagabond’s wake and…

The bam-bam-bam-bam-bam of the automatic rifle sent Neil rolling off the deck back into the side cockpit, the slugs slammed through the forward Plexiglas windows of the wheelhouse, and Jim swung the trimaran sharply into another evasive turn to starboard.

Trembling, Neil quickly crept back up to peer astern, but the launch was no longer in their wake; from the sound of the outboard it seemed to be returning to the port side.

Two quick shots rang out from forward, sounding like Tony with the .38, and a vicious bam-bam-bam-bam answered from the automatic rifle.

Jim swerved again, this time into the launch, and the two boats collided with a crash that elicited a scream from one of the attackers. Jim held the trimaran at full port rudder, the two boats crashing together again, and a man suddenly pulled himself up onto the deck behind the port cockpit and .fired two shots at Jim as he crouched at the helm.

Hearing rather than seeing what was happening, Neil leaped aft to get around the wheelhouse, saw the man with the gun, shot him once, and then kept running across his cabin top to fire his last three shots down into the launch, which was speeding along, locked together with Vagabond. Then he dove into the port cockpit, rolling away into the wheelhouse. Jim, squatting down, pulled the wheel now full the other way; Vagabond swept off to starboard.

Trembling and tingling with fear again, Neil crawled behind the wheelhouse settee for protection, listening for the sound of gunfire, his shoulders and back waiting to feel the thud and sting of a bullet. Then, in the silence, he realized that the launch was no longer bumping Vagabond’s port hull. He dared to raise his head to peer out the shattered Plexiglas window, but could see nothing. He ducked around into the starboard cockpit again, staring astern, but again could see no sign of the attackers. Although he knew he must have hit some of them in the boat, he was afraid Jim’s maneuvering had disoriented him and even now the attackers might be about to pick him off.

“Seth! Tony!” he called forward. “Come aft!”

He needed a weapon now that his .45 was out of ammunition. He thought he had hit two of the three dark figures in the speeding boat, knew he had hit the man on Vagabond’s deck—looked over to make certain he was still lying where he had been hit.

Tony thumped down into the cockpit beside him.

“Seth is hit,” Tony said. “But that boat is buzzing off.”

“Where?” said Neil.

“It’s way off the other side,” Tony replied. “I think I hit a couple of them.” Even in the darkness Neil could see Tony’s eyes were wide with excitement or fear. For a half-minute he remained crouched down, listening for the sound of the outboard, but he could no longer hear it.

“Are you all right, Jim?” he then whispered.

“Yes,” Jim answered, his voice cracking, “but they really wrecked poor Vagabond. ” The forward Plexiglas windows were shattered in five or six places. They’d have to check for other damage.

“Head us back east,” Neil said. “Keep us at full throttle.”

For a minute more Vagabond surged through the darkness, beginning, at almost nine knots, to smash into the swells with loud booming reports. Neil, Tony, and Jim stayed where they were, then Neil walked beside Jim and turned off the engine.

In a few seconds the noise of both the diesel and of Vagabond’s hull plowing through the swells had diminished to nothing, and Neil strained his ears to hear the outboard. There was no sound of it. Jim suddenly left the helm and vomited into the sea from the port cockpit. Expressionlessly he returned.

“Okay,” said Neil, feeling for the first time since the skirmish had started a measure of calm. “Get her going again, Jim. Come on, Tony, let’s see about Seth.”

In another thirty minutes the sense of danger had passed. Vagabond was almost four miles from the causeway and was now sailing before a light breeze. The night was dark, the engine switched off now, and she was both invisible and inaudible to any potential attacker, except at very close range. Neil and Jeanne did their best to treat Seth Sperling’s bullet wound, but they knew it was beyond their limited skills. Seth had been struck by the first burst of automatic rifle fire, a slug tearing through his left thigh and imbedding itself in his right thigh. The artery hadn’t been severed, so all they did was clean the wound, staunch the flow of blood, and give Seth some antibiotics.

Later, when Neil came up on deck, he realized that the man he had shot was still lying on the afterdeck. He went and knelt beside the body, that of a slender man, and searched his pants pockets: wallet, handkerchief, some change, several loose bills, a business card. Then he rolled the man over to look at the face. In the dim light from the aft cabin, where Jeanne was still sitting with Seth, he could see little, but something looked strange. He asked Frank to shine a light over and then he saw: the man’s face was disfigured with recent burns. Neil wondered if the whole boatload of attackers was equally disfigured.

He briefly recited from memory the concluding verses from the Navy burial service and then rolled the body into the sea.

At dawn Neil, sleeping in the back of the old wheelhouse area, was half-awakened by something. Lying on his back, he had the vague feeling of still being in a dream. He was disoriented. In the dream he had been lying where he was lying now, but Jim was at the helm, and another figure, also himself it seemed, was seated a few feet away on the port settee. The third figure in the wheelhouse was both himself and an intruder, and he struggled in his half-awakened state to determine who the other person was. In the dream the figure began to take on a more ominous emotional significance; Neil began to have the nightmarish feeling of struggling to awaken himself in order to deal with impending danger.

He sat up with a groan, awake at last. Jim was standing at the helm, as in his dream, and to his left, seated with characteristic calm, was the thick, compact figure of Conrad Macklin. He was sipping a cup of tea.

For a brief moment Neil felt himself back in the dream, then realized with a sinking feeling that he was facing reality. Conrad Macklin was back on board.

He looked steadily at Macklin, who gazed back without expression.

“Would you like some hot tea?” Macklin asked.

“Where’d you come from?” Neil finally asked.

“I never really left,” Macklin answered. “I stowed away in some kind of storage area up front.”

“How did you get back aboard?”

“Swam out, mostly underwater, right after you put me ashore,” Macklin replied. “Pulled myself up the anchor line while you were loading the last bunch onto the dinghy.”

Neil continued to stare at Macklin coldly, then released a long sigh. “A man is wounded,” he said. “I suppose you’d better take a look at him.”

“Good,” said Macklin.

“I doubt it,” said Neil.

An hour later, awake but with his eyes closed, he realized that all night long, even before the dream, something had been missing, something he ought to be feeling but was not. Vagabond was cutting cleanly through the blue waters; dead ahead the sunlight sparkled like diamonds on the whitecaps. He had escaped to sea; the horrors of the land were receding. At such times he should feel elated. But he didn’t. Something inside him must be telling him that this time there was no escape: the tentacles of land had reached out and even now lay heavily on his deck. He was at sea, but that ninety-eight cent lump of earth called man was still with him.