Long Voyage Back

Part Five SPIRIT

The “War”—the holocaust, the war of missiles, bombers, submarines, lasers, satellites, and all the sophisticated technology of modern military science—this war between the United States with its Western and Oriental allies and the Soviet Union with her allies, was over. No more missiles were being fired; nuclear explosions had ceased. Although death still came out of the sky, it fell now gently, subtly, like a soft rain. Although people still died, they no longer disappeared in a flash of light or exploded into fragments like a smashed pumpkin, but died in more natural animal ways: of starvation, of typhoid, of cholera, of dysentery, of pneumonia, of weariness, and of grief. Although no victory had been declared, no defeat acknowledged, the big war was over. Another had begun.

The new war, in a tradition as old as humanity itself, found the former enemies fighting on the same side against new enemies. Those who had survived the first war, often finding themselves with radioactive food and undrinkable water, with diseases known and unknown afflicting them and medical care scarce or absent, fled to those places that they supposed to be safer. The southern nations were first appalled by the invasion, then frightened, and finally angered by it. If the white nations of the north had blown up the world, let them not try to escape the consequences by fleeing south. Thus the new war had begun. It actually had been going on since the first week of the “War.”

Venezuela’s navy had forcibly prevented U.S. Navy ships from refueling in their ports. In the ensuing sea battle tactical nuclear bombs had been dropped. In miniature such battles had been repeated throughout the world ever since. American and Russian ships and planes, low on fuel, their home bases destroyed, sought refuge in neutral countries to the south. At first their ships or planes were impounded, their crews quarantined or interned. Later they were sunk or shot down, the survivors killed on the spot. As the warring nations slowly stopped being nations, so too did their armies, navies, and air forces slowly stop being armies, navies, and air forces. Individual units—a ship, a plane, a company of infantry, a tank squadron—began mini-invasions on their own. Soon any unidentified or foreign ship, plane, or person was considered an enemy to be eliminated. When the unknown epidemic that came to be called either “the plague” or “Nevada X” began to spread from the American West down through Mexico to Central America, and, in long, deadly bursts, to other countries around the world, foreigners, especially Americans, were feared, resented, and resisted all the more. To protect themselves the southern nations simply shut down all commercial air and sea traffic with the Northern Hemisphere. In effect they tried to build a wall and order the “War” and those who survived it not to enter.

Within the nations of the Southern Hemisphere other walls were also built. The rich retreated to their luxury homes and apartments and tried to keep the police and the military forces in line. In the West Indies and Central America the desperate and starving masses had already risen up and forcibly taken from those who still had something all that they had. Slow starvation and susceptibility to disease thus became universal. In South America, where food still was available and disease less rampant, the rich were able to hold on while the great masses of people, unemployed and barely fed, became weaker and weaker, more and more desperate.

And so, a third war was beginning: a war that was again as old as humanity, but was exacerbated by the gross overpopulation in the late twentieth century: the war between those who had enough to eat and those who did not. The governments of South America held out: shooting everyone who resisted, shooting all who tried to cross their borders, shooting everyone who questioned the siege mentality that they hoped would sustain them.

And thus throughout the world the war refugees were fighting a usually losing battle for survival. The “War” was over. The survivors didn’t notice.

The “convoy” composed of Vagabond and Scorpio was reunited off the northern coast of Anguilla late in the afternoon of the day following their escape from St. Thomas. Olly and Jim had brought Scorpio through the wild, bone-jarring hundred-mile passage, but only after blowing out two sails, developing frightening leaks that had them pumping almost continuously, and having Gregg’s arm broken.

With the wind and seas much diminished and their ships anchored off the lee shore of Anguilla, those on Vagabond and Scorpio transported supplies, adjusted ship’s crews, established radio frequencies and hours of transmission, as well as signaling procedures and defense strategies in case of attack, and set their course and rendezvous points in case they unexpectedly lost sight of each other. But even as they took heart from their safe passage Lisa reported to Neil something that Katya had mentioned briefly as they were fleeing the pirate estate: Lisa and Katya had apparently smoked a joint with a plague victim aboard Mollycoddle. In Katya’s brief, emotional account of her capture and imprisonment she had warned Neil tearfully that a black girl aboard Mollycoddle had been thrown overboard when Michael had realized how feverish she was. Katya had hysterically offered not to sail with them, but Neil had been obsessed with getting back to Mollycoddle and out to sea and had barely understood. And if he had, he still would have brought her along.

Neil passed this along to everyone and ordered them to always use the same personal cup for drinking and the same plate and utensils for eating. Oscar and his shipmates insisted that Jim and Lisa be transferred back to Vagabond. This was done, and neither one was to be involved with food preparation or galley cleanup. Jim joked that it was the best excuse for getting out of doing the dishes he’d ever had. Neil also suggested that mouth-to-mouth contact should be avoided. If the disease didn’t appear in a week or ten days, they could assume they were safe and relax some of the stringency of this regime—“Perhaps permit the holding of hands.” If there was no sign of the disease after ten days, they could “have an orgy.” But despite Neil’s efforts to make light of these new regulations, the effect was to make everyone realize that they might be carrying with them the very thing they had gone to sea to escape.

While they were anchored off Anguilla, Neil sent Jim and Sheila ashore to try to locate the nearest doctor. They returned ten hours later with the depressing information that there were no longer any doctors left on the whole island. They had all fled. Starvation was almost universal. Actually there was one old doctor they’d located in a small fishing village, but he was feeble and indicated he couldn’t cope with a bullet wound in the stomach.

Philip had been placed on the dinette settee in the main cabin, where the pitching and rolling of Vagabond was least felt during their topsy-turvy passage through the storm; now he was running a fever. Macklin indicated that an infection had taken hold in the abdomen. He had started Philip on an antibiotic, was giving him codeine for the pain, and was feeding him only liquids. Philip was urinating normally but had not had a bowel movement since he had been shot. There was still no evidence of internal hemorrhaging. Most of the pain was in his back, where the bullet had shattered a rib. Jeanne’s wound showed no signs of infection, and she insisted on being up and about with her left arm in a sling.

Since their proposed southeasterly course toward the eastern tip of Brazil and the mouth of the Amazon would leave them with never more than a day’s sail downwind to land, Sheila advised Neil to go ahead and they would see if Philip improved. They both knew that medical skill on most of the islands was probably limited. The farther south they got, the more likely they’d be to find competent doctors.

Neil made no effort to hide how long and difficult a passage they would have simply to get south to the equator, much less to find a home someplace along the coast of Brazil or on the islands of Ascension or St. Helena if that was their decision. By their third day at sea Oscar and Tony were already complaining. It was a voyage of almost two thousand miles to the equator, largely against the prevailing winds and along an inhospitable coast. If the leaks in Scorpio’s hull couldn’t be patched, they might not be able to continue as a fleet. Although the leaking was reduced from what it had been during the initial stormy passage from the Virgins, it still took five to ten minutes an hour of pumping to clear Scorpio’s bilge. Oscar and Tony maintained that Barbados might make a possible haven, but Neil, happy that the northeasterly wind was letting them head directly southeast toward the equator, refused. Their goal was to cross the equator to escape the fallout and “plague” of the Northern Hemisphere and to get to a country that had not been overwhelmed by the effects of the war. Neil also felt it was important to avoid land until the “plague” had run its course.

But from the beginning there was an atmosphere of heaviness and conflict aboard that was new. The death of Katya, the wounding of Philip and Jeanne, the knowledge that at any moment one or more of them might be stricken with a mortal illness, the awareness that for all the effort and the violence of their raid on the Mollycoddle pirates they were still living on short rations and still depending on the sea for their sustenance—all this created a depression in most of the crew that was deeper than ever before. Yet the effect on Neil was quite different and unexpected.

Something had broken inside him. Some coiled spring that had him tensely concentrating at every moment on the right strategies for survival was no longer there. For him, even though he had acted with all his skill and energy, the worst had happened: a loved one killed, two others wounded. Some part of him gave up. Or rather, some major part of him now accepted his own fallibility, mortality, inability to deal with the forces attacking them. He still commanded, but without the vehemence that had driven him since the wars began. Instead of feeling his usual rage at the forces of destruction when he realized that Lisa might be infected with the plague, he felt strangely tranquil, even gentle. When Tony publicly attacked him for the death of Katya, Neil was not angry at Tony at all: he knew that he was at fault and that he was helpless to do otherwise, and he now accepted both. He was helpless: somehow that new awareness liberated him.

Although he and Frank had had no formal reconciliation, Neil found himself feeling his old affection for him and turning most of the decisions about the sailing of Vagabond over to him. On Scorpio Olly was captain, with watch teams led by Tony, Oscar, and Arnie. On Vagabond Frank, Jim, and Sheila were the mates, Jeanne, Lisa, and Macklin crewing as necessary.

Neil no longer made any effort to disguise his feelings for Jeanne. He touched her, caressed her hair, tended to her wound, spoke to her lovingly. He made no effort to make love to her, both because of his concern for Frank and out of fear that he might be a carrier of the disease.

When Neil listened to the shortwave radio now and heard about the horrors others were facing throughout the world, he felt he was part of a larger family. On the second night out from Anguilla in particular he listened to two new ham operators, one in Florida, the other in Texas. At first he thought the anonymous voices had revived his Americanism, reminded him of his American roots and citizenship, but when he thought about it further, he realized that the larger family he felt connected to was that of the survivors.

He felt no connection with the President and his martial law and executive orders and his empty claims of victories. He felt no connection with the heroic pushers of buttons, the pilots of bombers, the submarine captains, the generals generaling from a half-mile down inside the earth somewhere. His people were the survivors, survivors all over the world, American, English, German, Russian, yes, Russian even, fleeing this incredible madness.

And, strangely, Neil found he could read again. From the first day of the holocaust until the evening that they dropped anchor off Anguilla he realized that he had been unable to read fiction or history or philosophy: everything had seemed so trivial or so irrelevant in the face of his quest for survival. Then suddenly that evening he spent two hours reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one of two dozen classic novels he had aboard. The adolescent joys of Natasha and Sonya and young Count Rostov brought tears to his eyes: the joys that Lisa and Katya were missing—had missed. The battle of Austerlitz, although totally remote from their experiences of the previous month, seemed so real, so human, that his own life and the wounds of Philip and Jeanne seemed human, bearable. He knew that the joy he found in Tolstoy represented—paradoxically in the light of Katya’s tragic death—his strangely recovered joy in life, and his acceptance of his powerlessness.

Jeanne seemed to have been affected by Katya’s death, her own wound, and the fact that she had killed a man in a slightly different way. She appeared more pensive and puzzled. Neil could see that she too was less desperate than they both had been for most of the earlier time, but he could also see that as she watched for signs of illness in Lisa, she hadn’t quite decided how she could take another such blow. Neil and Jeanne spent more time talking, not just about the day-to-day details of survival but also about the question of who was to blame for everything that had happened, large and small. Although Jeanne saw that her killing Larry had been an act of self-defense, she argued quietly that if they hadn’t attacked the pirates’ estate, her life might not have had to be defended. When Neil reminded her that the pirates had kidnapped Katya, she hadn’t replied, and Neil felt remorse again: they had retrieved Katya only to sail her to her death.

As they talked away their third afternoon at sea Scorpio was visible two hundred yards off to starboard. Both boats were moving smoothly in the brisk tradewinds, sailing slightly to windward but not enough to cause heavy slamming. Neil was at the helm, Jeanne on the port seat of the newly open central cockpit. The sky was clear, the day already warm. Jeanne was dressed as she usually was in shorts and a bikini top, Neil in cutoff jeans. She noticed that the tendons in the backs of his legs were showing and realized that he had lost weight. His severe face was made even more severe by the deep lines that creased it. It saddened her to see him like this.

“We’re failing,” Jeanne said to him impulsively. “We’re divided and failing. We’re making all the same mistakes that led to the War in the first place.” Like everyone else aboard, she referred to it as the “War,” not the “Third World War” or anything else. To her, to them, it was the “War,” all previous wars being insignificant skirmishes in comparison. It could not have a number because it had had no predecessor and couldn’t conceivably have a sequel.

Neil turned to look at her but didn’t reply.

“We’re failing,” she repeated.

“We’re alive, Jeanne,” he finally said. “We’re not yet starving to death. We’re sixteen people sailing away from danger. We’ve made mistakes, but we’ve avoided worse ones.”

“But what’s the sense?” said Jeanne. “To get food for a week or two, Philip and I get shot. To escape, Katya dies. We must be doing something wrong.”

Neil winced. “I know it seems that way,” he said. “But illness, violence, and death are the new norm. They can’t be avoided.”

“And there’s Frank,” Jeanne said, as if the name itself summarized an entire problem. She searched Neil’s face to see if he had an answer for her, and nodding to her, he gestured with his free hand for her to come to him. She went to his side, and he took her hand.

“Frank hasn’t asked us to stop loving each other,” Neil went on, “although that’s the only thing that would change things for him. He’s only asked us not to make love. For the time being, with Frank as weak as he is, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for him.”

“I know,” said Jeanne. “But as you yourself said, it’s really no solution. It doesn’t stop him from resenting you… us.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“That’s what I can’t stand,” she said. “You and he were friends. He and I… now…”

When she looked up at him, he returned her gaze sternly and removed his hand from hers. He sighed.

“You expect too much of us, Jeanne,” he said. “Good people hurt each other. It’s built into the universe.”

“There were only ten of us,” Jeanne persisted. “Surely we’re capable of creating a happy life for ten people.”

“No, I don’t think we are,” Neil said. “Not when those ten are forced to live with each other whether they like it or not. Not when those ten are threatened with death every day. No, Jeanne, be thankful your children are with you, that I love you, that people like Olly and Philip and Sheila have come into our lives. For the rest, conflict and suffering and death will be in the air we breathe for a long time.”

But if there was peace in Neil’s heart, there was nothing but dissension in his fleet. In the late afternoon of the fifth day out from Anguilla Tony and Oscar, who had asked to come over to have a conference with Neil, arrived aboard Vagabond. Frank had visited Scorpio at midday while Neil was taking the noon sunshot, and he was to be in on the conference too. Although the main cabin would be hot and stuffy, Tony suggested they go below for privacy, forgetting that Philip was berthed there. Instead they sat in the back of the wheelhouse area. Actually the wheelhouse had ceased to exist; only the Plexiglas windows forward remained. Neil had ordered it torn down so that the six-by-ten plywood and Fiberglas roof could be sawed in two, glued together, and Fiberglassed over to make a new dagger board. The walls had come down too. Vagabond now had open cockpits running athwart the entire boat aft of the cabins in the three hulls. Two small sun awnings were rigged up over most of this area, but it was all open to wind and weather.

Oscar and Frank sat on the aft seat, Neil and Tony next to each other on the port seat. Gaunt, bearded, and unkempt, they reminded Neil of four derelicts gathering to share a bottle of cheap wine. Only there was no wine.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Neil gaily. “This is quite a formal occasion. You apparently have something you want to discuss.”

“That’s right,” said Tony, looking Neil firmly in the eye. “This beating to windward is going to break Scorpio apart. We’re pumping half the time. It’s time to change course.”

“We’ve already discussed this,” Neil replied quietly. “Jim, Olly, and I all agree our present course is best. Frank, Mac, and I have all been coming over to help with the pumping, and you won’t take Jim.”

“But everyone on my ship except the old guy is in favor of sailing to Barbados,” said Oscar. “And since Frank agrees, we outvote you.”

“Take Scorpio and go,” said Neil quietly.

“No,” said Oscar, “we don’t want to split up if we can help it. We want to reestablish the normal order of things.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” said Neil.

“Tell him, Frank,” said Tony. “First about the captain thing.”

Frank cleared his throat and slowly raised his eyes to Neil. Great gray half-moons made deep hollows under both his eyes, and the skin around his neck was loose. Sitting hunched over, staring downward had become his characteristic posture.

“When you announced you were the captain of Vagabond in the Chesapeake,” Frank began slowly, “I went along with it. I went along because back then there were twenty or so madmen aboard and your speech shaped them up.” He paused.

“Nineteen madmen,” Tony interjected. “Remember I was there then too.”

Frank blinked once, cleared his throat again, and went on.

“Now there aren’t,” he said. “Now me, Tony, Jim, Olly… even Sheila I guess… any one of us could be captain of Vagabond and run the ship. Maybe not as well as you, but competently…”

Neil held his gaze steadily on Frank but didn’t respond.

“In becoming your first mate I temporarily forfeited my ownership rights to Vagabond,” Frank continued. “In those days, with an untrained crew, it was probably a good way to do things. Now… I’m reasserting my rights as owner.”

“And I’m asserting my rights as owner of Scorpio, ” said Oscar.

“Oh?” said Neil, choosing to look at Oscar, whose long hair and bushy mustache were tangled and streaked with salt, making him look the least reputable of the derelicts. “And what does that mean?”

“It means I want Tony as captain and not the old man.”

“And what’s wrong with Captain Olly?”

“He never gives any orders except the ones you give him,” Oscar replied. “Tony, Arnie, and I run the watches the way we want anyway.”

Neil laughed. “I’d say he sounds like a perfect captain.”

“I want Tony,” Oscar repeated sullenly.

“And what does your reasserting ownership of Vagabond mean, Frank?” Neil asked. He saw that Frank’s gaze could not entirely conceal the uncertainty, anxiety even, that Frank must have been feeling.

“It means that the captain serves at my pleasure,” he replied slowly. “It means that I set the course, the captain only determines how to get there.”

“And the same on my boat,” said Oscar.

Neil was surprised that he felt no anger or resentment, but rather a strange kind of serenity that was only slightly tinged with sadness. Very slowly he shook his head.

“No, good friend,” he said to Frank. “I didn’t take the ownership of Vagabond away from you. The War did.”

“The War’s over, Neil,” Frank replied. “You don’t seem to accept it, but it’s over.”

“No, it’s not, Frank,” Neil said calmly. “At least not the war that deprived you of your ownership rights. And yours too, Oscar. No, I’m afraid none of us owns anything anymore.”

“That’s convenient for you to say,” said Tony, “since you don’t own a boat.”

“Frank doesn’t own Vagabond,” Neil went on. “And I don’t own my captaincy or my other skills. You don’t think I’m free to do what I want, do you? Your lives sometimes depend on my skills, so I’m not free to withdraw them, irrespective of likes or dislikes. Our lives depend on Vagabond and Scorpio. You two don’t own them any more than the man who happens to ‘own’ all the water on a crowded desert island owns the water. By the nature of the situation everyone who needs it, owns it.”

“Bullshit!” Tony exploded. “It’s Frank’s boat. All that intellectual crap doesn’t change it!”

“You’re right, Tony,” Neil responded mildly. “My intellectual crap doesn’t change it. The world changed it.”

Frank was watching him, his uncertainty more evident now. Oscar looked sullen, Tony angry and defiant. Neil rose from his seat, stretched his arms, and yawned.

“If you think you own your boats, go ahead and think so,” he said and then turned to look directly down at Frank. “But if you try to act as owner, then the world, your friends, your family, will collapse. You can’t reinstate the old ways by decree.” He watched Frank for a moment—Frank was hunched over, looking at the floor—and then turned to Oscar and Tony.

“Olly is an excellent captain because he gives orders only to maintain order,” he went on. “Tony here is an excellent sailor, stronger and quicker than Olly, and Tony would make an absolutely shitty captain. Tony would give orders not to maintain order but to demonstrate that he was captain, and that’s the perfect formula for chaos.”

“You conceited bastard!” said Tony.

“The War’s over, Neil,” Frank said in a husky voice. “You’re still running, I believe you’ll always be, but it’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Neil replied, “and I intend to keep running.”

“Dragging us with you,” Frank said.

“No. If enough people want to take a different course, then we’ll split up,” said Neil. “The cowards can come with me, and the brave ones return to the West Indies.”

“And who determines which group takes which boat?” asked Frank.

“Not me, Frank. Not you. Vagabond should go to those who have to sail to windward. Scorpio to those who can use her best.”

“And who decides that?” asked Frank.

“The goddamn owners decide, is who,” snapped Tony.

“There are no easy solutions,” Neil said softly to Frank. “Think about it, Frank. Would throwing me overboard really solve any of your problems?”

“We’re not going to throw you overboard,” Tony interjected. “Good as the idea may be.”

“Think about it, Frank,” said Neil, still without raising his voice. “Get away from these clowns and see the world as it is.”

Tony’s fist caught Neil just below his left ear and sent him stumbling across to the opposite seat, where he fell awkwardly, half on his knees.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Frank shouted, getting to his feet and holding out an arm to keep Tony from Neil.

Neil glanced up at Tony looming over him a few feet away and waited for his head to clear and the ringing to stop.

“This bastard can’t keep calling me names and expect me to take it,” Tony barked out in reply to Frank. “If he thinks he’s captain, let him show it with his fists.”

Neil’s head was slowly clearing, and he stood up. He noticed that at the helm Sheila had half-turned toward them, watching.

“I’m sorry I called you names, Tony,” he said quietly. “I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“You chickening out?”

“I made a mistake in insulting you,” Neil went on. “I apologize.”

“Jesus. What is this?”

“And if you ever pull something like that again I’ll smash your nose out the back of your head,” Neil concluded. He brushed past Tony and went down into the main cabin.

At the wheel Sheila held Vagabond steadily on course.

Over the next several days neither Oscar nor Frank renewed their request and both crews seemed to return to a contented routine. They were lucky with the wind: it blew steadily much more from the northeast than usual and let them sail more southeast than they had hoped. Scorpio began leaking less rapidly. Other events encouraged Neil.

Macklin had probed Philip’s wound and removed the second bullet, and the infection seemed to be subsiding. Jeanne’s wound was healing perfectly. No one had shown any symptoms of the plague. A squall had left them with a plentiful supply of fresh water.

The only continuing source of anxiety was their food situation. Neil and Frank had rationed the two boats for a three-week voyage, rations that assumed they would be catching at least one fish a day. They weren’t. Both boats were trolling all the time and hooking nothing. The seas appeared to be empty. Macklin had machine-gunned a porpoise at dawn one day when he was alone on watch, but the creature had sunk before he could maneuver over to it. The bloodstained water had been somehow depressing to Neil and Frank, who had rushed up on deck at the sound of the gunshots.

Because they were sailing more southeast than expected, they were well away from the danger of pirates. Although Vagabond was about two knots faster than Scorpio in the trade winds, Neil carried reduced sail and spent a day aboard Scorpio helping Olly get every last ounce of speed out of her. At night Vagabond would sometimes get a few miles ahead of Scorpio and then heave to in the early morning.

It was good to see Jim and Lisa looking so happy and well. They were sleeping together now in the forepeak; Jim said jokingly that he was determined to share everything with Lisa, even the plague. Macklin now roomed with Frank. Tony had taken up with the slender young woman named Mirabai, apparently stealing her from Gregg, the young man with the broken arm. Janice, Oscar’s girl friend, was the only other woman aboard Scorpio, a third female crew member apparently having chosen to join the commune at Salt Point just before they left.

They met no other ships on their first six days out of Anguilla. They passed more than sixty miles east of Barbados and after a week were seventy miles northeast of Devil’s Island off the coast of Guiana. The fear of the plague was receding. Jeanne was not only regaining her strength but her spirits, standing watch with Frank most of the time, playing more happily than usual with Skippy, even enjoying her food more.

Olly too seemed to have regained his high spirits. Frank sometimes spent a day aboard Scorpio as captain and, back aboard Vagabond, Olly entertained his friends with exaggerated praise for the “oldness” of Scorpio, claiming nothing was truly beautiful until it was “at least sixty.”

“She’s as bald and toothless as me,” he said, “but she can still bite.”

Olly was aboard Vagabond when they spotted their first vessel. Jim was alone at the helm in an overcast dawn, little different from each of the last several days. Neil was curled up on a wheelhouse cushion behind him. In the galley Jeanne had just begun to parcel out the small bits of dried fish and dried fruit that would be their morning meal. Visibility was only about a mile, and Jim was sleepy at the end of an uneventful watch. Vagabond was ghosting along at only three or four knots in a light wind, so he glanced mainly at the compass. There was nothing to see out on the water except the same gray slate they’d been staring at for so long.

And then, after exchanging a few idle words with Jeanne and yawning, Jim glanced ahead and saw, so large and clear and close that it was as if God had that very instant set it down in the sea in front of them, a long gray submarine. Vagabond was sailing forward, barely rocking, and there, ahead and a little to port, lay a submarine. With a red star. A Soviet submarine.

For several moments Jim stood staring in disbelief at this gray dawn’s apparition. Then, almost incredulous, he turned to Neil.

“Neil!” he hissed in a loud whisper, as if his voice might reveal the fifty-foot trimaran’s location to the enemy.

Neil sat up slowly rubbing his eyes. “Mmmhuh?”

“A submarine. Dead ahead.”

Groggy, Neil stood up and peered forward.

“Living God,” he murmured.

Jeanne, aware of suppressed sounds from above, came to the hatchway entrance and looked up.

“What’ll I do?” Jim asked in a low voice.

“Hold your course.” Neil knocked on the wheelhouse floor to awaken Olly, who was asleep below.

“All hands!” he called in a sharp but low voice.

“What’s happening?” Jeanne asked from the hatchway, then climbed the three steps and looked out: ahead and off to port, now only two hundred yards away, was the submarine, fully surfaced, with a dozen men on the main deck and several in the conning tower. The boat was immense: almost two football fields long; it was like sailing past an island. Even as she watched, a gun—some sort of artillery—emerged from the forward deck. Several men clustered around it. She saw several officers in the conning tower looking at them through binoculars.

In his underwear Olly poked his head into the wheelhouse, hair disheveled, sleepy-eyed, the bones of his ribs showing prominently. He blinked at the gray monster. They were going to pass within a hundred feet of it. He could see two sailors pissing off the bow, and he could also see the eight-foot naval gun being swiveled into position to fire on Vagabond.

“Raise your arms!” Olly shouted to them. “Raise your arms! It’ll help their morale.”

Neil lifted his arms in surrender, as did Jeanne. Jim adjusted his position so that he could steer with his thighs and chest, and then he too raised his arms.

“Sheila, get on up here!” Olly shouted. “And bring Skip. Mac!” He himself, arms raised, clad only in his underdrawers, walked into the cockpit, closer to the enemy. When Sheila came on deck, she took in the scene in stunned silence and slowly raised her arms in surrender.

As quiet and softly as a feather drifting in a pond, Vagabond was now gliding past the Russian submarine, less than ninety feet away. On its deck stood almost twenty Soviet sailors, staring in disbelief. In Vagabond’s cockpit stood three men, two women, and a child, all with their arms raised in surrender, facing the barrel of a cannon aimed directly at them. From the conning tower three Soviet officers were conferring agitatedly. As Vagabond sailed gently by the gun crew turned a wheel and kept the cannon trained amidships. One of them was looking to the conning tower for instructions. The submarine crew had quite possibly discharged up to twelve missiles in the past two months and presumably killed hundreds of thousands, more likely millions, of people they had never seen. Now they had a puny cannon aimed at seven people they could see.

An officer on the conning tower shouted something at Vagabond; he sounded angry, and shouted again. Vagabond was now sailing serenely away from the submarine and was already a hundred and fifty feet off.

“Shouldn’t we heave to?” Macklin asked in a whisper.

“Keep sailing!” Neil replied quietly, his arms still raised.

Again the Russian shouted, this time to his own men, and there was a flurry of activity in the conning tower. A sailor raced down the ladder to the deck. Vagabond sailed on. The cannon swiveled to follow her. A single shot would blow Vagabond to bits.

“We’d better heave to,” Sheila said urgently to Neil.

But Neil and Olly were both grinning. “Keep sailing!” Olly shouted happily.

They sailed on. Slowly, softly, as if she were tiptoeing past a sleeping giant, Vagabond bore away from the great metal leviathan that threatened to destroy them. For a panicky moment Neil was convinced that the captain of the sub was going to wait until the range presented a challenge to his gun crew and then blast them out of the water. Then that moment passed. The Russian gun crew, or most of it, dispersed; now they seemed to be occupied with a different problem. The strange, otherworldly meeting of the great gray engine of destruction and the white sailing vessel was ended.

Still Neil and the others stood with their arms raised.

“Can’t I put my arms down now?” Skippy complained.

“Yes,” said Neil with strange seriousness. “You can lower your arms. We’ve beaten them.”

As they all lowered their arms Jeanne stared at the distant smudge of gray on the horizon and then looked at Neil.

“Beaten them?” she asked.

“No, not beaten them,” he said, correcting himself and still looking thoughtful. “But we won the only way we could have.”

Olly slapped Macklin on the back and gave Sheila a hug and kiss.

“We showed ’em, didn’t we?” he said, grinning wildly. “They didn’t dare fire a shot. Totally bluffed ’em.”

Vagabond ghosted on ahead.

All that day they celebrated their “victory” over the Russian submarine, rafting themselves to Scorpio for over an hour to make sure Olly had a chance to tell everyone the story. They broke out some of the last Mollycoddle rum and partied. They were less than seven hundred miles from the equator and began planning another celebration for that nautical event. They even caught a fifteen-pound fish, their first in four days.

It was nine days since they’d left St. Thomas, and with the fear of the plague disappearing, Jim and Lisa were even accepted as crew members back aboard Scorpio, Jim being a welcome fresh hand at the tedious task of pumping and Lisa happy to be back with some of the young people again.

Neil himself created his own celebration: that evening he again made love to Jeanne. With Frank seeming to have withdrawn from everybody, he went to her cabin openly, while Macklin and Sheila were on watch. The lovemaking with Jeanne was more tender than the first time, a long, quiet coming together that, strangely, left them both in tears. Afterward Jeanne talked in a long rush of her hopes for Lisa and Skip and of their finding a haven. For the first time Neil found himself sharing her hopes, even as he noticed with a start the boney knees and protruding ribs of Skip lying in the other berth. To bury his fears, to bury their fears, they made love again.

At eleven they went back topside. Macklin had gone below to sleep, and Sheila was steering. When Jeanne went below to check on Philip, Neil went aft to his cabin to radio Olly. There was something strange in Olly’s voice when they made radio contact. After answering Neil’s initial question about how badly Scorpio was leaking—it was taking fifteen minutes of manual pumping every hour to clear the bilges— Olly quietly lowered the boom: Lisa was sick. She had stomach cramps and a fever. She probably had “that disease thing we been worrying about.”

So, thought Neil, after he’d given Olly instructions for isolating both Lisa and Jim in the forepeak, this was how it all ended. You could run, but you couldn’t hide. You could do everything you could think of to flee south as fast as possible and still Death, in unhurried omnipotence, overtook you.

Sitting in his cabin in the darkness, he didn’t feel like moving. He’d have to tell Jeanne, Sheila, the others. He’d have to deal with the panic, here and, probably worse, aboard Scorpio. He’d have to decide what to do.

What to do? He wondered how many thousand people, no, million people, in the last two months had looked up into the ash-gray sky, asked what to do, knowing all the time that there was nothing to do but die.

Had they reached that point? Was Jeanne doomed, even when he felt he’d barely met her? Was Jim, who had grown from a boy to a man in two months, now literally going to burn out at eighteen?

Lisa was sick, cramps and fever. There was an enemy to be fought. They had the advantage of an infinite supply of cool seawater to counteract the fever, and a good supply of aspirin from the Morison. Lisa, while thin, was still not weak or severely undernourished from their long weeks of short rations. She would begin her personal battle with youth on her side.

As for the disease spreading, Jim was probably infected, but whether others were or would be depended on luck and discipline.

The standing orders he’d given regarding food, sanitation, and personal contact had not been taken very seriously—until today.

And who was to care for the sick? Olly would do it. He didn’t know about the others aboard Scorpio. Over here on Vagabond Jeanne would do it, would insist on doing it. Frank maybe; the old Frank would have. Sheila would volunteer. Himself? No. It wasn’t his kind of suicide mission.

Well, time to go to it. He stood up, took a brush to his hair and beard, as if preparing for a formal call, and left his cabin. By the light of the kerosene lantern hanging down in the main cabin he could see Sheila at the helm. He could hear Jeanne’s voice below in the main cabin. He came up to Sheila and impulsively put his arm around her.

“How are we doing?” he asked.

“Eight knots southeast,” she said, glancing at him quickly, her small gray eyes looking at him slyly, like a cat, the lines of aging around them crinkling nicely.

“How’s Philip?” he asked.

“The same. A hundred and two.”

Neil frowned.

“Well, a hundred and two won’t kill him,” he said, “but it won’t have him raising sails soon either.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Olly thinks Lisa has the plague,” Neil announced abruptly.

Sheila looked at him again and then half-leaned against him, taking her left hand from the wheel and letting it fall awkwardly against Neil’s.

“Oh, Neil,” she said’, slipping her arm around his waist now. “What a bloody shame.”

“You don’t catch Death napping.”

They stood beside each other, staring forward for another moment, then exchanged a warm look and a brief hug.

“I’ve got to tell… the others,” he said, and went below. Jeanne was there with Frank, drinking tea and sitting up with Philip who, now that Vagabond was pounding to windward again, was propped up in position on his makeshift dinette berth. He was lying under a thin sheet, awake, staring at the ceiling. The paneled room had a warm glow from the kerosene lantern that hung from a hook right above his head. Frank was sitting on the edge of Philip’s berth, Jeanne standing up. Both looked at him intently when he came in.

Neil had the same impulse to embrace each of them. He went up first to Frank, leaned down close to him, and put a hand gently on his shoulder. Frank stared back at him in surprise. Neil smiled.

“You’re a wonderful man, Frank,” he said.

Frank flushed. “You’re stoned,” he said. “You’ve raided Mollycoddle’s pot..”

“You still alive, Phil?” Neil asked, then straightening up, leaving his hand on Frank’s shoulder, gently kneading it. Philip smiled and turned his head slightly to look at Neil.

“I believe so,” he said. “I just wet my pants again.”

“Good sign,” said Neil. “Corpses rarely piss.”

When he turned next to Jeanne he saw that she was also staring at him in surprise. He went up to her and took her in his arms, caressing her lower back, careful of her left shoulder. Looking down at her, he asked, “How are you?”

“I’m fine. What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

Neil, not smiling, nodded in reply. Then he released her, glanced at Frank, and paced over to the companionway steps before turning and facing them.

“Olly reports that Lisa has cramps and a fever,” he said. “He assumes it’s the disease we’ve been worrying about.”

All three of them looked at him without immediate response. He realized that this statement seemed so inconsistent with his earlier tone of humorous affection that they briefly wondered if this was a sick joke.

“We… I chose this risk,” he went on, feeling embarrassed by the way he had acted earlier, though it had seemed so appropriate at the time. “Now we have to pay. I think there’s a good chance we can pull her through. But we’ve got to take absolutely insane precautions to keep it from spreading further.”

“I’ll go take care of her,” Jeanne said.

Neil felt his heart sink.

“I’m not letting you go,” he said gently. “I’ve already assigned Jim to care for her. I don’t think she can give him anything now she hasn’t already given him.”

“Is Jim all right?” Frank asked.

“Apparently. Olly said only Lisa is sick.”

“I’m going over to her,” said Jeanne.

So this is how it ends, thought Neil again. Modern technology finding ever new ways to kill brave people, and brave people rushing to get their share.

“No,” said Neil. “Jim will take care of Lisa.”

“I can see my own daughter, can’t I?” Jeanne suddenly shouted at him.

“No, you can’t,” Neil replied quietly. “As you once said, we’re one family now and you can’t endanger the rest of us unnecessarily.”

Jeanne turned away and began to cry. Both Neil and Frank went over to her and made comforting sounds and caressed her, and even as they did, Neil realized they were also trying to reassure themselves and each other as well. But of course there was no comfort or reassurance for any of them.

“Neil!” Sheila shouted from the helm.

Neil hurried up on deck. She was pointing off to starboard, where a bright red glow was visible off Scorpio’s stern.

“A red flare,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean an emergency radio transmission?”

“Yes,” Neil said, hurrying past her. “I’ll go take it.”

In his cabin he groped for the flashlight and shone it on the VHF radio that he used for short-range ship-to-ship communication. It was already tuned to the correct frequency, and in less than half a minute he had established contact with Scorpio. The voice that came back at him was Tony’s.

“Scorpio reads you, Vagabond. This is Tony. Lisa’s got the plague. Those of us on Scorpio can’t stay with her. Either she’s got to go or we do. Over.”

Neil at first wondered if he had heard correctly, but then he knew he had.

“What the hell do you mean?” he shot back nevertheless. “Over.”

“I mean Lisa should be… buried at sea. Now. Before she fucking kills us all. Or… or… those that are willing to risk their lives for her come stay on Scorpio and we’ll shift to Vagabond… Over.”

So that’s what it’s all about. “Let me speak to my captain over there,” said Neil. “Over.”

“You’re speaking to him.”

“I want Captain Olly.”

When Neil shifted to Receive, he got nothing. He waited.

“Captain Olly can’t make it,” Tony finally said. “Over.”

“I’ll speak to Jim,” Neil fired back.

“Jim’s locked in with Lisa,” Tony replied. “He can’t talk to you either. Look—”

Neil snapped off the radio and stood up. What selfish cowards. Who were they? Tony, Oscar certainly, the two young women… Would they be so heartless or frightened? Probably. Gregg and Arnie? They were passive. He went back up on deck.

“I’m afraid Jeanne’s gone to her cabin to get ready to go over to Scorpio,” Sheila reported.

Neil looked at her and then nodded.

“There’s been a mutiny on Scorpio,” he announced. “Tony has deposed Olly and wants to abandon ship or toss Lisa overboard.”

“Good Lord,” said Sheila. “Poor stupid Tony…”

“Your poor stupid Tony is a…” Neil was about to vent his rage with a string of unimaginative obscenities but stopped himself.

“We should head for land, Neil,” said Sheila suddenly. “There we can quarantine the sick and get the best treatment for them… and for Philip.”

So this is how it ends, thought Neil a third time. The dying rushing to the dying for help. The well murdering the sick. What horrors stood next in line?

“We’ve no right to take our sickness to land,” he said. “We fight our battle here, at sea. Some of us will live, some die, but we don’t bring death to others.”

“But you’re forcing those people on Scorpio to take the biggest risk,” Sheila pointed out.

“No,” he answered wearily. “I’m ordering Lisa and Jim and Olly to return to Vagabond.”

Neil informed Scorpio of his intention to take off Jim, Lisa, and Olly but said that they should wait until dawn, six hours hence, to make the transfer. In the interim Jim and Lisa should be kept isolated in their cabin. Oscar, who took the message, made no comment.

When Macklin came on duty at midnight, he was informed of the situation. Macklin grunted, asked Neil if there were anything special he wanted said to Scorpio at the regular two a.m. radio check, and took the helm. Jeanne was down in her cabin with Skippy, satisfied that Lisa would be returned to her. Sheila, off watch, was down with Philip. Neil took over the helm while Macklin had a cup of tea, compliments of Mollycoddle.

“So what’s the use of staying at sea?” Frank asked from a seat behind Neil. “The worst has happened out here. There’s nothing left to run from.”

Neil was struck by how resigned Frank seemed to be. He still had expressed neither rage nor grief that his son might soon be in the grip of a fatal disease.

“We’re still not welcome anywhere,” Neil replied. “And now, carrying what we carry, people are justified in asking us to stay away.”

“The whole world’s dying, Neil,” Frank said. “You’ll never find a place that isn’t.”

“No, I won’t,” Neil agreed.

“Then why stay out here?” Frank said with sudden vehemence. “You’re sick. You’re becoming some sort of crazy Flying Dutchman, cursing yourself and anyone stupid enough to follow you to spend eternity sailing around endlessly at sea.”

“I don’t see it that way, Frank,” Neil replied. “I still see my best defense as being out here, the enemies still bunched up mostly on land.”

Frank got up and came over to stand beside Neil. “So now you’re ordering death brought directly on board,” he said.

“He’s your son,” Neil countered.

“If it were Tony or Conrad who were sick, you’d throw him overboard,” Frank insisted quietly.

Neil hesitated, then replied evenly, “If it had been them at Salt Point, I never would have let them back on board. You’re right there.”

“You’d throw them overboard,” Frank repeated.

Neil didn’t answer. He knew he wouldn’t literally throw them overboard, but he recognized that his response would be quite different.

“And how would you handle things, Frank?”

“Put the sick ashore. Split up. Stop this fucking running.”

Neil smiled bitterly. “I’ll stop running when he stops chasing,” he said sadly.

“You’re mad.”

“Let’s just say we’d handle it differently,” Neil commented, turning the wheel over to Macklin, who had just come up on deck. “Zero seventy-five degrees. Keep an eye on the number-two jib. It may be too much for her. Wake me up at three forty-five. Good night.”

But Neil was not awakened at three forty-five. He was awakened at dawn by the sound of something rubbing against Vagabond’s port side. He sat up, instantly awake, listening for the sound again, and angry that daylight was there and he hadn’t been called. The sound came again: a crunch and a squeal, something rubbing against her side. It even sounded like fenders rubbing against a dock, but Vagabond was hissing through the sea at a good speed. She was also sliding down a wave, sailing downwind. She had altered course and was running west.

He stood up, pulled on his cutoff jeans, and reached over to slide his hatch open. It didn’t open. He banged on it several times, almost instantly regretting that he had when he realized that his orders had been disobeyed and he was probably locked in his cabin. He went to get his gun from beside his berth and saw it was gone. So.

He could hear voices now, Frank’s and Tony’s among them. The peculiar sounds he was hearing must be the two boats’ hulls and fenders scraping against each other as Scorpio and Vagabond sailed downwind together. Neil banged on the hatch again and shouted loudly, calling Frank. He kept it up for a solid minute until finally he heard someone fiddling with a padlock.

The hatch slid open and Oscar, gun in hand, looked down at him warily. Neil climbed quickly up the steps and, even as Oscar began ordering him to stay put, brushed past him and made for the cockpit. On the port side Scorpio was rafted to Vagabond. Tony, Mirabai, and Janice were transferring food from Scorpio to the trimaran, the two women taking it down into Vagabond’s galley. Macklin, with his .45, stood guard. Sheila was at the wheel, Olly at Scorpio’s. The two boats, under reduced sail, were sailing downwind in a moderate tradewind. The sun was only a few degrees above the horizon in a clear sky. As Neil moved slowly toward the others Frank, who was standing next to Sheila, turned to face him.

“I asked to be awakened at three forty-five,” Neil said to him, hearkening back instinctively to the first act of disobedience, as if being locked in his cabin and threatened with a gun were less noteworthy.

“It’s over, Neil,” Frank said wearily, looking strangely beaten and resigned. “I… I’ve taken, retaken command of Vagabond. We’re splitting up.”

Tony had waved off a cardboard carton of food that Mirabai was about to hand him and pulled out his gun. He now came cautiously toward the place where Neil was standing, just outside the old wheelhouse area on the starboard side. Macklin’s gun was aimed at Neil now.

“And what’s all this transfer business?” Neil asked Frank, ignoring Tony.

“Lisa and Jim are being left aboard Scorpio,” Frank said. “Those who are still healthy are all coming aboard Vagabond…” Frank stopped, his eyes lifeless. He glanced at Tony.

“Jeanne’s elected to stay with them,” Tony said. “That’s where she is now. So has Olly. We assume you will too.”

“And you’re taking Vagabond to Barbados?” Neil asked Tony.

“That’s right,” Tony replied, holding the gun at his side. “And since most of the people are coming with us, and you and Olly think you can feed yourselves from the sea, we’re also taking most of the food. Besides, if things don’t work out on Barbados, we’ll have to keep sailing downwind until we find some island or some place in Colombia or Panama where we can make a go of it. I figure the weak little countries in the West Indies or Central America are a lot safer than places like Brazil. There are already a lot more Americans where we’re going too.”

“If you’re going to land and I’m staying at sea,” Neil said to Frank, “then you should let me take Vagabond. You won’t need either her space of windward oceangoing ability.”

“It’s settled,” Macklin said sharply. “We’re taking Vagabond. ”

“Scorpio’s not seaworthy enough for the voyage I recommend,” Neil persisted, “but she’s just as good for heading west. As soon as she stops having to beat to windward, she’ll stop leaking.”

“Mac said it’s settled,” Tony snapped back. “If you leave, you have to take Scorpio. ”

“He says it’s settled,” said Neil with a rush of anger. “I don’t.” There was another tense silence.

“Frank also says so, as the ship’s owner,” Macklin replied stonily. “And this gun says so too.”

“You’re choosing to abandon Jim?” Neil asked Frank.

“He chose to go to Salt Point,” Frank replied, looking dully at Neil. “He chose Lisa. He chooses you. He has to take the consequences.”

“He’s your son!” Neil said.

“He’s dying.” Frank said softly.

“Jim’s already got the disease,” Tony said. “His temperature’s already as high as Lisa’s.”

The two boats, rubbing and rolling, suddenly spilled rapidly down the face of a wave, and everyone staggered or stumbled to regain his or her balance. Mirabai spilled a box of food onto the port cockpit deck. As he regained his balance Neil felt a heaviness stealing into him, the heaviness of giving up, the heaviness he’d experienced after long days of battling a storm at sea when the body says “No more,” “I’ll do it later,” “Sink the fucking ship.” No matter how fast he ran, the forces of dissolution ran faster. He couldn’t believe that the West Indies or Central America would offer anything but slow death; he couldn’t believe that any land could be as safe as remaining out at sea for as long as possible. But with Scorpio he might no longer have such a choice.

“Sheila and Philip?” he asked, almost to himself.

“Philip’s too sedated right now to decide,” Sheila answered. “I feel… his life may depend on getting him to a physician soon. Scorpio… given the alternatives Tony has given us… I feel that… Vagabond…”

“You’re right, of course,” Neil said, nodding.

Captain Olly had turned Scorpio’s helm over to Janice and came over to the rail.

“Jeanne says she needs more of Vagabond’s towels,” he said loudly to all of them. Neil saw now that the left side of Olly’s face was badly bruised, his eye almost swollen shut.

“What happened to you?” Frank asked, frowning, and apparently he too was seeing Olly up close for the first time.

“I ain’t the ducker I used to be,” he said, sniffing.. “Sorry I let you down, cap,” he added to Neil.

“Tell her to use old clothes,” Tony responded. “We’re not parting with any of Vagabond’s stuff.”

“Get her some towels,” Frank said to Mirabai, who brushed quickly past Tony and went below. Macklin was about to stop her, flushed with anger, then let her go and didn’t comment. In a moment she reappeared with three rather ratty-looking towels from Jeanne’s cabin and handed them across to Olly.

“You win, Frank,” Neil said loudly. “I’ve decided I’m not going on that death ship either. I’m staying on Vagabond.”

Mirabai, who was passing from the cockpit to the galley with Scorpio’s food supplies, carried on indifferently when he said this, but everyone else who had heard him stopped and looked at him, Tony and Macklin with suspicion, Sheila and Frank with surprise.

“It’s a trick,” said Macklin. “Don’t trust him.”

“It’s quite simple,” Neil went on. “The doomed are going on Scorpio, and the winners are taking Vagabond. Although I may not be captain, I’m still free to choose the winners.”

“What about Jeanne?” Frank asked, looking at him with puzzled surprise.

“Yes, Frank,” Neil replied, staring at him intently. “What about Jeanne?”

“I mean… she… ”

“She’s doomed on Scorpio. ”

“Not if you’re with her,” Frank said.

“Let’s cut this crap,” Macklin broke in. “Neil’s sailing on Scorpio no matter what he wants.”

“No, Conrad, no,” Neil replied quietly with a half-smile. “That would be mutiny and perhaps murder. You’re capable of that, but Frank isn’t. Can I keep my same cabin, Frank?”

“I’m taking the aft cabin,” Tony interjected.

“I’m addressing the owner,” Neil said, continuing to look at Frank.

“You really want to stay?” Frank asked.

“As much as you do, Frank. As much as you.”

“Me too,” said Olly, who had been listening from the deck of Scorpio. Now he climbed aboard Vagabond with an exaggerated smile, rendered grotesque by his puffy face. “Gotten so I prefer three-wheelers,” he added.

“Get back on board Scorpio, ” Macklin shouted, nervous and angry.

“Course the company ain’t as nice here,” Olly said, “but I’m used to the stink of rotting things so—”

Tony instinctively lashed out at Olly with his gunhand. When Olly parried the blow and knocked the gun away, Macklin swung his gun into Olly’s chest, sending him back against the cockpit seat, groaning.

“Hey!” Frank yelled, rushing forward.

Macklin leveled his automatic and flicked off the safety.

“Hold it!” he snapped fiercely, backing into the corner of the cockpit and looking uneasily at Frank. Frank stopped only a few feet from where Tony was stooping to retrieve his gun.

“The charade’s over,” Macklin announced. “Tony and I are taking over.”

“What’s that mean?” Frank said, his fists clenched at his sides.

“It means Tony and I are taking Vagabond, and you can join your friends on Scorpio.”

“You little bastard,” Frank growled, “you couldn’t handle Vagabond for a single second.”

“Get off the boat,” said Macklin.

“Jesus, you and Tony are clowns,” said Frank, sneering. With a suddenness that surprised everyone he grabbed Tony’s gun and tried to twist it free, using Tony’s body as a shield. Crouching in the corner ten feet away, Macklin trained his gun first on Frank and then on Neil, who had taken three quick steps toward him; then he swung it back around and fired a single shot at the tangle of Frank and Tony.

For a moment that tangle seemed to continue its wrestling unaffected, but then Frank slumped to the cockpit floor. Tony, breathing heavily, straightened up and stared down fearfully at his fallen adversary.

Macklin, sweating, turned his gun back on Neil. Jeanne appeared in Scorpio’s cockpit next to Janice, at the helm.

“What happened?” she asked into the silence aboard Vagabond.

Macklin wheeled toward her with a scowl.

“Get back below or I’ll kill you.”

“Get below!” Sheila shouted to her. “He’s shot Frank.” A look of shock appeared on Jeanne’s face, then she moved slowly past Janice to Scorpio’s starboard rail. She could now see Frank’s bleeding body in Vagabond’s rear cockpit.

“Oh, my God,” she said and climbed aboard.

Tony and Mirabai, still worried about infection, quickly left the cockpit area to avoid her. Mirabai returned to Scorpio, and Tony came into the wheelhouse. As Jeanne knelt beside Frank’s fallen body, Macklin held his gun on Neil.

“Oscar,” he said, “put the barrel of your gun in Loken’s back and escort him over onto Scorpio.”

As Neil felt Oscar’s gun press into his back he began walking toward Macklin, who was still crouched back against the far corner of the cockpit, his eyes darting nervously. The two boats were sailing serenely forward at six knots, still lashed side to side, rubbing and crashing but held off by their fenders.

Neil glanced at Sheila as he passed her at the helm and hoped she might try to help. Mirabai came up on deck again aboard Scorpio.

“That’s it,” she said to Macklin. “I’ve brought over everything you asked me to.”

Macklin glanced swiftly at her, then back at Neil, who was now only six feet away. Vagabond suddenly swung to port, her port bow crashing hard against Scorpio and throwing all of them off balance: Sheila had acted.

Neil wheeled and, grabbing Oscar’s gun arm, hurled him across the wheelhouse. He crashed into the mizzenmast, his gun was ripped from his hand, and he slumped to the floor. As Neil turned back toward Macklin he saw Jeanne wrestling for possession of Macklin’s gun. Neil leapt forward, throwing his weight against Macklin’s left side and sending all three of them crashing against the combing. Jeanne screamed as her left arm struck, then sank slowly to the deck. Neil grabbed Macklin’s gun arm and began banging it against the edge of the combing. Groaning, Macklin let go of the gun.

Grabbing Macklin by the belt and shirt front, Neil half-carried, half-dragged him past Frank and Jeanne to the rear of the cockpit, lifted him high up over his head, and hurled him into the sea. Macklin’s head struck the side of Vagabond’s deck. He fell between the two boats, bobbed up briefly in the boats’ wakes, then disappeared behind a swell.

Neil stood staring after him for a moment, then turned back to the cockpit. Jeanne had knelt down beside Frank again, rocking back and forth, almost as if she had forgotten the violence swirling around her. Neil crouched down beside them.

Frank’s eyes were open and clear, but a thin line of blood trickled from his mouth. He was laboring for each breath, his chest rising, shuddering, and collapsing. Neil knew a lung must have been punctured. Jeanne had placed a towel beneath his ribcage, and Neil took it away, pushed up his shirt, and revealed what looked like an exit wound from the bullet. The sight of the copious bleeding gave Neil a sinking feeling.

He groaned, reaching out to touch Frank and letting a hand fall helplessly on his shoulder. Frank managed a grin that was mostly a grimace.

“Christ,” he gasped out, “have I botched it.”

“Can’t we help him?” asked Jeanne.

“Yes,” said Neil. “We’ve got to drain the blood from his lung. Somehow get new blood into him.” He stood up. Tony was in a corner of the wheelhouse along with the still groggy Oscar. For Neil they had no more relevance than bothersome insects.

“We’re taking Vagabond,” he said to them, “and staying at sea for the time being. We’ll redivide the food after we’ve tried to save Frank.”

Tony stood with one arm holding the mizzenmast to steady himself, the other still clutching his pistol. He seemed to be groping for an appropriate course of action and not finding one.

“You’ll have to tell me when you changed course during the night,” Neil went on. “I’ll plot your course for Barbados.”

“You… you’re letting us go?” Tony asked, as if it had been Neil who was holding a gun on him.

“Yes,” said Neil, and went below to try to save what still could be saved.

Once again Vagabond sailed on alone. The two boats had parted. Tony, Oscar, and the four others had taken Scorpio, planning to sail it downwind back to Barbados. Neil had checked over the relative food supplies of the two ships, sent some back to Scorpio, and had given Tony one of the two automatic rifles and some ammunition. His last exchange with Tony was brief.

“Good luck,” Neil said to him as they prepared to cast off the rafting lines.

Tony, who had been unusually subdued in the two hours since Frank had been shot, simply nodded.

“You too,” he said, and as Neil released one line and was moving to untie the next, added quickly, “Sorry about…” but didn’t finish.

Neil merely released the second line, signaled Olly on the port bow to release his, and the two boats, free of each other at last, angled out and away from each other. Since Vagabond was now altering course from west back to southeast, the two boats had to cross paths once more, Vagabond luffing her sails and then sailing across Scorpio’s wake. For a moment everyone on both boats acted as if the other boat weren’t there, until Olly, still on Vagabond’s bow collecting the fenders, stood up and waved heartily.

“Go get ’em, Tony,” he shouted. Tony gave a subdued wave in return, and then the two vessels were speeding away from each other, one to the west, one to the southeast, each to its own fate.

“Always give people encouragement when they’re sailing off,” Olly said to Neil after he’d returned aft. “Otherwise they might come back.”

Philip and Sheila had remained with Vagabond. When Sheila had talked to her husband late that morning about joining Scorpio, Philip had shaken his head.

“I have to have something to live for,” Philip told her. “With those people I wouldn’t. Here… I do.”

But his fever was now over a hundred and three degrees; Neil started a third antibiotic.

Frank, berthed in the dinette where Philip had been, was still alive. They had sedated him, drained the blood from the lung, and managed, with great difficulty and uncertainty, to draw almost a pint of blood from Sheila’s arm and inject it into Frank. Neil knew that with the primitive syringe he was using there was danger of an embolism, but he had concluded that without a transfusion Frank wouldn’t survive the first night. Lisa and Jim were quarantined in Frank’s old cabin, Philip installed on a wheelhouse settee, with Sheila in the forepeak. Jeanne and Skippy remained in the port cabin, but Jeanne began to spend most of her time with Lisa and Jim, planning to sleep on their cabin floor. The disease would reach its climax in the first three or four days, so the battle might well be won or lost quickly. Knowing that the disease was not airborne and that cleanliness could have a decisive effect on whether it spread or not, Neil hoped that they could contain it.

Although he was less hopeful that they could save Jim and Lisa, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. All during that long first day Jeanne and Neil tended the two feverish patients. They lay on adjacent berths, only conscious occasionally, sometimes hallucinating, their temperatures over one hundred and five degrees. Jeanne worked tirelessly, putting on and taking off the seawater-soaked towels and shirts, carrying Lisa’s bony, torrid body to immerse her in the side cockpit, which had been filled with six inches of seawater. She watched helplessly as the fever raged on unabated and Lisa’s breath become faster and faster, shallower and shallower. Neil helped bring water and towels and moved Jim when necessary; Sheila often helped them, but most of the burden was Jeanne’s.

Neil found it depressing to be down in the heat and stink of Frank’s cabin to confront the sweating bodies, feverish eyes, and incoherent mutterings of Jim and Lisa. Jim kept trying to act as if he were only mildly sick, joking about it, always asking about Lisa, who was just out of sight around the partition that separated their two berths, and once even volunteering to help carry her to the seawater bath in the cockpit. When he found he couldn’t even stand up, he lost some, of his youthful cockiness.

With three of the ship’s company close to death and those who were still healthy feeling almost powerless to help them, the gloom during the day was broken only once, when in late afternoon Olly unexpectedly announced that they should hold a short memorial service for Conrad Macklin, as they had ten days before for Katya.

“He was our shipmate,” Olly explained. “And besides, burying him might put us in a better mood.” So Olly, Neil, and Sheila had stood awkwardly in a side cockpit and Olly had spoken.

“Well, Lord, we want to pay our last respects to Conrad Macklin,” Olly began in a serious voice and with bowed head. “Connie was probably beat on as a kid, and his mom probably weaned him too early and his dad must have kicked his butt, so he developed into something of a shit, Lord, pardon the expression, but he didn’t work hard at it and was only that way when he felt like it. Still we figure You got the big picture, Lord, and will know exactly what to do with Connie. Us, we got the small picture. All we could think of doing with him was throw him to the sharks… Amen, Lord. Over and out.”

Neil and Sheila said nothing.

“Now we symbolically commit his body to the sea,” said Olly and, when he slapped Neil on the back, Neil gathered the ceremony was over.

“Funny thing, death,” Olly announced as they walked back into the wheelhouse area. Neil waited for him to come out with some sort of punchline but he didn’t, as if his three words summarized his meager fund of wisdom on the subject.

Neil was doctoring Frank. When the wounded man spoke without bitterness of Tony and Macklin, his tranquility began to remind Neil of Sam Brumburger. Frank even joked about their triangular relationship with Jeanne, announcing that he was “retiring from the field.” Feeling helpless in treating Frank, twelve hours after the mutiny Neil made the decision to head for land. Frank’s chances were slim at best, and then only if they could find modern medical facilities on the coast of Brazil.

Neil was aware of the dangers involved: the Brazilian government was sinking unauthorized ships who tried to land. The day before an airplane had passed overhead, the first they’d seen since leaving the Virgin Islands, and a freighter had passed them heading south. These sightings had disturbed Neil at the time; he feared that Vagabond’s presence might be reported to the Brazilian military authorities. His hope lay in their lying off the northeastern coast of Brazil, relatively uninhabited, and in Vagabond’s approaching the coast at night and hopefully arriving at dawn. He consulted with each of the others, warned them of the terrible dangers of landing, but they all voted to risk it. Frank alone argued against it.

“I don’t think I’m going to make it, no matter how many tubes they stick in me,” he said painfully. “You ought to stay out to sea.”

But they turned southwest, heading for one of the coastal towns to the north of the mouth of the Amazon. Neil didn’t plan to sail into a harbor but to sneak in, find a sympathetic doctor, and only then to bring Frank ashore.

At dusk, after looking at his primitive large-scale map of the coast, he went to fetch their automatic rifle and to begin planning defensive strategies for their landfall. The rifle was missing. He asked Sheila if she had moved it, and she said no. Nor had Olly. Disturbed, he discovered the 9 mm automatic on his cabin shelf was missing too. He asked Olly to check for the two other weapons they kept in the main cabin, and he reported them missing too. He and Olly were leaving the main cabin feeling baffled when Jeanne met them coming from hers.

“I threw the guns overboard,” she announced quietly, looking frightened of what Neil’s reaction might be.

Neil stopped in front of her, stunned, staring at her, not wanting to believe her, but knowing that this was the only explanation. “All four of them?” he asked.

She nodded.

“My God,” he commented, turning away from her and staring off astern.

“I know I seem crazy to you,” she said quietly, “but I don’t want to live in the kind of world they create.” Neil still looked away, his lined, bearded face tense and puzzled. “I love you, Neil. I know you’ve saved us a dozen times, sometimes with guns, but never again. Now we live or die like the rest of God’s creatures, by the strength of our bodies alone.”

Neil still stared stiffly off to sea, Olly, behind him, stroking his wispy white beard and scowling.

“I can understand what you did, Jeanne,” Sheila said from the helm. “The guns make us a part of the madness of the rest of the world. I’m glad they’re gone.”

Jeanne looked thankfully at Sheila and then back at Neil.

“Never trusted ’em myself either,” said Olly. “Only thing I ever killed with a gun was a rabbit, and he died of a heart attack from my missing him so often.”

Neil walked farther aft and stared out at Vagabond’s wake. At first he had felt enraged that Jeanne had acted behind his back like that, frightened by the unexpected loss of weapons he thought he needed to survive, but with the voices of Sheila and Olly echoing Jeanne’s, he felt an unexpected sense of tranquility replace his anger. The guns were gone. They themselves were out at sea, only a half-day from land and the enemy. It was not possible that the kind of fighting they’d had to do was over, but even if it wasn’t, the odds were heavily against their winning, even with guns. They’d have to fight the way they’d fought the submarine. We’d better, he thought, smiling ruefully to himself at the thought of their being armed now with Olly’s gaff and the flare gun. He walked back to Jeanne and held her gently.

“You did what you had to do, Jeanne,” he said, aware of the tension in her that these new horrors had caused. He could feel her yielding only slightly in his embrace. “We haven’t had much luck holding off death with guns, so it can’t be much worse without.”

At dawn they were still twenty miles off the coast. An hour later land came into sight. Ten minutes after that a jet fighter-bomber, a French Mirage, streaked out of the sky from the west and passed with a roar directly over them.

Neil had made contingency plans for both air and sea attacks, and, being unarmed, their plans involved either surrendering or playing possum. They were already flying the Brazilian flag—homemade from a piece of sheet—but it would be difficult to surrender to a jet plane they had no radio contact with. As the jet shrieked past and began to climb and turn he shouted at everyone to get down into Frank’s cabin. He himself dashed below to prepare the flares. He didn’t know whether the jet would return or whether it would attack them if it did, but as Olly and Sheila passed him carrying Philip they exchanged pained glances, the look of soldiers marching to a battle they didn’t expect to win.

As he returned from the main cabin with the flares Neil had a chance to look back: the jet was making a long graceful sweep up the sky to the right, then around and back toward Vagabond. Neil was alone at the helm, making no effort to take evasive action, two smoke flares and two fire flares on the control panel shelf, a box of dry matches nearby. The plane grew rapidly larger, and Neil experienced the brief image of a man facing a firing squad. Then there was a brief flash from beneath the jet and almost simultaneously the rush and roar of the missile tearing past the trimaran. The jet shrieked past a second time.

His hands trembling, Neil lit one of the smoke flares and tossed it down into the main cabin. He lit the second and threw it down into the empty port cabin. Dark smoke billowed up out of both cabins within seconds as Neil returned to prepare to ignite one of the light flares. The missile had struck at least a half-mile ahead of Vagabond, but he doubted the pilot had been able to follow its trajectory. As the jet rose and swept to the right a second time the pilot would look back and see his target enveloped in dark smoke. Their hope lay in the pilot’s being satisfied with a probable kill.

But the jet returned. As Neil lit his third flare it fired a second missile. So close did the second shot come to Vagabond that Neil thought it might have gone through the mainsail; it burst less than a hundred yards in front of them. The bright flash of the lit flare must have looked to the pilot—if he could see it, which was doubtful— like a direct hit. The jet roared over the smoke-enshrouded trimaran, and Neil, coughing and almost overcome by the smoke, rushed forward and dropped the jib and mainsail. Then he rushed back through the smoke and down into the starboard cabin with the others. Thick black smoke was pouring out of two of Vagabond’s cabins into the air.

Neil’s hands were black, and one hand had been burned when he lit the third flare. Jeanne and the others looked at him, as if they were asking him to announce their fate. He didn’t have to tell them they hadn’t been hit, and only later did he realize that they didn’t even know they’d been fired on.

The jet didn’t return a fourth time. It returned to base apparently confident that it had prevailed in its battle with the trimaran.

After five minutes of waiting, with the smoke gradually getting worse even in the closed-off cabin, Neil and Olly went back up on deck. Both smoke flares were going out, but something was still burning in the galley. Neil had to go down and extinguish a smoldering rug. The whole interior of the main cabin was black with the smoke.

The others now climbed out of Jeanne’s cabin to survey the damage, but there was no damage. The multimillion-dollar aircraft had fired two highly sophisticated missiles at the plywood and Fiberglas sailboat, but, as Neil explained, they had been metal- or heat-seeking missiles. Vagabond, engineless, gave off no heat and had so little metal in her aluminum spars that the missile couldn’t find her. The pilot had been trained to fire in the general area of the target and let the missile do the fine tuning. Vagabond and her crew had been saved by modern technology.

Two hours later they raised sail again. After they had discussed their next course of action, they decided that they should get as far out of the area as possible: to run directly east for another sixty miles, which would put them fifty or sixty miles off the coast. They would have to do their best for Frank and Philip and Jim and Lisa without the help of the rest of the world. They were alone.

As they sailed on toward the equator the heat and humidity became stupefying; only the recurrent squalls, by refreshing their supply of water, kept them alive and sane.

All Neil felt he dared do for Frank was give him a second blood transfusion, but with the plague victims it was an hourly battle to try to cool off their bodies. The seawater was twenty degrees cooler than the air, and they used it continually. But over the next three days the fever raged on. Twice Lisa went into convulsions, twice she recovered. Jim jabbered on in some otherworldly hallucination about snow and cold and the bottom of the world, sometimes giggling hysterically.

On the third day, after Lisa had had her second bout of convulsions, Neil came down into the cabin and found Jeanne up on the berth with Lisa, her face buried on Lisa’s bare chest and neck, sobbing. For a moment Neil thought that Lisa must have died; a wave of sadness immobilized him. Then he noticed her rapid, shallow breathing and realized that Jeanne, who had been driving herself beyond reason, was suddenly giving up. Pressing her face and mouth against Lisa’s flesh was almost a kind of suicide.

He went up to the edge of the berth, gently pulled her back toward him and, as she wailed and struggled, less gently dragged her out of the cabin. With Olly and Sheila watching uncertainly, he took soap and seawater and scrubbed her face, neck, and arms. She struggled and cried like a child being punished. Neil even forced the soap rag inside her mouth before finally letting her go.

“Take her back to her own cabin,” he said quietly to Sheila. “Keep her there. I’ll take over responsibility for Jim and Lisa until Jeanne’s rested.”

Back belowdecks when he felt Lisa’s forehead, he was horrified: he’d never felt a human body so hot. He dispensed with the side cockpit pool and the towels and instead began throwing buckets of seawater directly over Lisa and Jim and the towels and clothing that wrapped their naked bodies. For half an hour he lugged the buckets down and poured the cool seawater over them. Later he’d have to bail out the cabin’s bilge.

Forty minutes later he went to see Jeanne in her cabin. She was alone and, after asking how she was and receiving a dull reply, he said to her, “I miss you, Jeanne.”

“Miss me?” she said, looking puzzled. “Oh,” she added, understanding.

“I know of no law saying I can’t love you,” he said. “Do you?”

“No,” she replied, not looking at him.

“Nor a law prohibiting your loving me,” he went on. “Is there?”

Her face still averted, she said, “Only a law of nature.”

“What law is that?”

“When a mother is threatened with the loss of her child, she loses a part of herself.”

“I see,” said Neil. “That I can’t help.”

“Nor can I,” said Jeanne.

“And I still miss you.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“There are no barriers between us now,” Neil said gently, “except those we erect in our own hearts.”

“I know,” she whispered again, crying softly. “But I can’t knock them down.”

“But what are they?” Neil asked gently.

She looked up at him at last, warm tears in her eyes.

“Fear,” she said.

“Fear?”

“We’re all doomed,” she said. “No matter how hard we try, one by one we’re going to die. Our desperate acts are just dancing on a hot griddle before the end.”

For a long moment he held her gaze, searching for words of reassurance, searching for the incantation that would smash the barrier. He could find none.

“Still,” he finally managed. “Dancing is better than nothing.”

“Until you get tired,” she responded.

Although Frank felt better on the morning after the jet attack, some strangely detached part of himself knew he was going to die. It wasn’t any rational conclusion based on medical or anatomical knowledge; it was some previously uncontacted part of himself informing him from some unknown world of reality, which, paradoxically, he didn’t believe in. A mystic certainty had come to him, Frank, the most unmystical of men.

When the heavy sedation Neil had given him began to wear off and his mind began to clear, Frank was surprised at how he felt. His anger against Neil and his jealousy were totally gone. His earlier decision to abandon Jim, Jeanne, and his friends seemed totally senseless. He knew it had come out of his resentment and sadness at losing Jeanne, but to his new way of looking at things losing Jeanne seemed as trivial an event as losing an anchor. The thought of her, even now, made his heart ache, but the ache was somehow amusing, trivial, like hiccups.

Even his own death had a somewhat comic quality: wrestling with one big clown, being shot by a small one. Surviving megatons of destruction to succumb to a tiny piece of lead.

Jim’s death, if Jim were going to die, was not comic. It was sad. It was the only thing that made him truly sad. It was the only thing that made him resent the war, resent the holocaust. Jim should live. Lisa should live. Children should live. It was he and Neil and Olly and Philip and their generation that had let things happen: they could die knowing they deserved it, but not their children. We are the one generation in human history to snuff out untold millions, no, billions, of lives of all creatures for untold centuries. We were the assholes that let it happen.

For even as he accepted his own fate with equanimity, he felt a quiet fury at the way he had led his life. He saw that his joyful playing with money, so dissociated from any human reality, was his personal contribution to the holocaust. He had been a part owner of General Electric and General Dynamics, both when he owned some of their stock and when he didn’t. He never built a bomb or pushed a button, but he helped pay the men who did.

It made his life pathetic. All his successes and failures now seemed so trivial compared to the Big Failure; all his aspirations so selfish compared to those he might have had, but didn’t. But could men have done anything to stop the flow of events to the ultimate madness? Although he had always thought they couldn’t, though his reason even now argued they couldn’t, that new voice from that strange detached world announced unreservedly that men could have stopped the flow of events as inefficiently, sporadically, and bumblingly as they had set that flow of events in motion. The creative capacity for building rockets that occasionally blew up on their pads was equally capable of tearing them all apart and burying them, and could have done it with the same margin of error.

Although it took a lot out of him to talk and though Neil reminded him that every ounce of energy was needed, Frank was thankful that first Jeanne and then Neil let him say a few things he wanted to say.

Jeanne was pale, puffy-eyed, and disheveled when he saw her, thirty hours after she’d begun taking care of Lisa and Jim. It seemed to Frank she was almost like a madwoman. When she came down into the main cabin and washed her hands and arms and then sat beside him for a moment, he smiled up at her.

“You look like you’re the one who got shot,” he said.

She looked startled and didn’t smile.

“I’m sorry Lisa’s sick, Jeannie,” he went on, aware that his strange levity was out of place with her now.

“How are you, Frank?” she rejoined, finally centering her attention on him.

“Pretty good,” he answered. “Even dying.”

“You’re not dying, Frank,” she said urgently.

“It doesn’t matter, dying’s not what it’s cracked up to be,” Frank went on, vaguely thinking that he might be feverish. “And I’m sorry I butted in between you and Neil.”

“That’s not important now.”

“I know it’s not,” Frank said, “but I still wanted to tell you.”

“I’m sorry I can’t love you the way you deserve.”

“Hell, Jeanne,” Frank said, smiling. “I’d want to be loved a lot more than that.”

Again she looked at him questioningly as if she were uncertain he was in his right mind. Then she smiled.

“Thank you,” she said, “for being the way you are.”

He felt a wave of weariness pass through him and then responded. “It’s simple to become wise,” he said. “Just get shot.”

The next day he and Neil talked.

“We’re only a day’s sail from the equator,” Neil announced.

Frank, whose weariness was increasing and who now slept most of the time, opened his eyes to look at Neil. “You plan to bury me there?”

“I hope to save you.”

Frank closed his eyes, nodded almost imperceptibly, then opened them again. “Too late, buddy.”

“Maybe,” said Neil. “But we’ll try.”

Frank struggled up into consciousness again. “I’m sorry I won’t be rounding Cape Horn with you.”

“Not very likely.”

“The sailing was always great,” he said softly. “It was… the human stuff that messed us up…”

As Neil looked down, Frank thought he saw tears in his eyes.

“You, me, and the rest of the world,” said Neil.

“Yeah,” said Frank.

For another half-minute neither man spoke and a series of confused images raced through Frank’s mind until Neil rose to leave.

“Last word,” Frank mumbled, and Neil stopped. Frank opened his eyes and felt a strange giddy joy flowing through him. He smiled feverishly up at Neil. “Advice…” he announced to Neil. “I think… the market is… at a low…” He felt like laughing. “Good time to buy.”

Neil, like Jeanne, looked down at him uncertainly, then nodded, smiling slightly in return.

“Nowhere to go but up,” Neil commented.

“Right…” said Frank, closing his eyes.

At dawn two days later Frank died.

Neil was surprised and unsettled by the grief he felt. He had known Frank was dying and thought he had hardened himself, but when Olly called him down and he saw Frank’s limp body and open mouth, an emptiness and gloom descended upon him that left him immobilized. He realized how much unspoken companionship he and Frank had enjoyed, even during the estranged period of the last month. The two communicated in a shorthand about the way Vagabond sailed that Neil couldn’t share with anyone else. To realize that he had lost this friend, first to jealousy and now to death, grieved him.

Instead of giving Olly orders about what to do, he wandered back out of the cabin and walked aft to stare out at the sea. A distant part of him felt the burden of having to tell Jeanne. But he felt passive, weary. He felt a sad, self-pitying sense that everything was useless, that Death, like a cat playing with crippled mice, could take him and his loved ones at any time he wanted. A tickling on his cheeks and saltiness in a corner of his mouth made him realize that he was crying.

Jeanne came up to him. Seeing her eyes beaming with happiness, he realized that no one had told her about Frank’s death. She didn’t even notice his tears.

“Neil,” she said softly, “the fever… the fever’s down. I think… I think it’s breaking.”

Neil looked down at her, dazed, trying to absorb the meaning of her words. “Lisa?”

“Both of them,” she answered, softly—as if she were afraid that if she announced it too loudly, the gods would change their minds. “Jim two hours ago, and now Lisa. Come see.”

Mechanically Neil followed her down into Frank’s old cabin. The floor was wet, the room sweltering in the heat of the equator. Lisa lay wanly on the first berth staring at him, a shy smile on her face, beads of perspiration or salt water all over her body. Jeanne adjusted a towel to hide Lisa’s nakedness.

“I… I’m feeling better,” Lisa said.

“I’m glad,” said Neil simply, feeling tears for Frank and tears of joy for Lisa’s recovery welling up in his eyes again.

“I’m… hungry,” Lisa announced uncertainly, as if she had finally isolated the unique sensation she was feeling.

Neil nodded and reached out to put his hand briefly on hers. Then Jeanne, smiling, pulled him farther forward to see Jim, who was up on an elbow looking at him. Somehow Jim seemed to sense Neil’s restrained mood.

“How… is dad?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

Neil, aware of Jeanne beside him, still exhilarated by the survival of the two young people, couldn’t answer.

“I’m glad you came through, Jim,” he said.

But again Jim picked up Neil’s unspoken feelings.

“Dad… isn’t… isn’t?” he asked Neil.

“Frank died,” Neil said. “Just twenty minutes ago.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Jim began to nod slowly.

“He said good-bye to me,” Jim whispered hoarsely. “He came to me an hour ago… his spirit, you know, and told me… to live… to take care of everybody.”

Neil nodded as Jeanne leaned against him, absorbing the news of Frank’s death. He put his arm around her.

“Frank probably saved us all back during the mutiny,” Neil said. “Now we’ll need you.”

But Jim now had tears in his eyes. “But I wish…” he began again in a voice weak from three days of disuse. “I wish he could be with us when we… if we… finally…”

“…live.” Jeanne finished softly.

After burying Frank at sea, they sailed on.

They kept Vagabond well off the Brazilian coast, hoping to reduce the chance of being attacked by another plane or a gunboat, their destination still uncertain. As long as food and water held out they would continue into the South Atlantic. Nothing they were hearing from around the world encouraged them to try to land. The plague was still spreading. Shortwave transmissions from all of Europe had ceased. Most U.S. broadcasters had shut down. An AM station in Uruguay reported that a series of food riots in Rio de Janeiro had been suppressed by the army and left over three thousand people dead, and the Brazilian air force had attacked and sunk a freighter crammed with refugees that had tried, after repeated warnings to turn back, to enter the harbor at Rio de Janeiro. Rio was staggering under the impact of her unemployed and starving millions, who were begging, stealing, rioting, and fleeing to and arriving from all over Brazil. Thousands had died in the last month from disease or starvation, many from the newly introduced plague.

But the alternatives to landing In Brazil were equally dismal. The few small islands in the South Atlantic were governed by Brazil or Argentina, and their friendliness to American refugees was as doubtful as that of the mainland.

Argentina, because it hadn’t needed to import food, seemed slightly preferable. But the last Spanish-language broadcast that Sheila had been able to understand before their transistor radio batteries went dead had indicated that illegal immigrants were being quarantined and put in internment camps, a gloomy prospect unless and until they actually began to starve to death. In the meantime they would sail south, hope that the plague would run its course on land and would not reappear aboard Vagabond, hope that they could feed themselves from the sea, and wait.

In eleven days they reached the latitude of Rio, passing a hundred miles to the east. Their tentative destination was the coast below Mar del Plata, two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

When their shortwave radio broke down, they were left without a functioning radio. They began sailing alone amidst a depressing silence from the rest of the world.

And the sea too seemed silent and empty. They saw no other ships. No seabirds accompanied them. Although they trolled all the time, usually with two rods and two lures, the fish, if they were there, usually spurned their offerings. As they grew weaker from their increasingly strict rationing they began to dip into their emergency food kit. They established a schedule of rationing that would permit them to reach southern Argentina with an empty larder.

But Vagabond sailed now in peace. Their harmony was not simply the result of the lassitude brought on by malnutrition, but rather of the trust and affection that had been forged out of their common experience of the horrors of the previous two and a half months. Neil and Jeanne were lovers, husband and wife; so too were Jim and Lisa, although Lisa still had not fully recovered from the disease and was barely able to walk. Sheila and Philip were their benevolent aunt and uncle; Olly the grandpa. Neil lived with Jeanne and Skippy in her port cabin; the Wellingtons had taken over his aft cabin.

Jim slowly recovered his strength. At first Neil and Jeanne had thought that his quiet dignity was only weakness, the aftereffects of the disease, but soon they realized that with death so near, Jim had found the same tranquility that Frank had come to during his last hours. He developed a new low-key sense of humor and was no longer in awe of Neil but able to poke fun at him.

Lisa, although the disease had left her pathetically weak, was childlike in the joy she showed in being alive and in love with Jim. Each morning he carried her from their starboard cabin to the open cockpit areas where she could be with the others. Neil urged books upon her, Skippy urged her to play games with him, Philip began to teach her navigation. She did a little of each. Although her weakness was sometimes heartrending—they had no idea how completely she might eventually recover—the joy she found in Jim, her happiness in living, made it impossible to be depressed in her presence.

But as they moved farther south they were also moving into the late winter of the Southern Hemisphere. They were pitifully unprepared for the cold, especially after having just suffered through two weeks at the equator. Their bodies were lacking in fat that could be burned off to warm them. There was little winter clothing aboard. With the propane supply exhausted and their kerosene almost gone, they had no fuel to warm the cabins, and the three women took the two wool blankets aboard and began to convert them into warm clothing. The only cold-weather gear they had was Neil’s orange float suit, and they needed two or three additional winter garments so that at least three people could be out on deck at once if necessary. They cut and sewed one small woolen jumpsuit to fit Lisa and Sheila and another larger one to fit Jim, Neil, and Philip. From the remains of the blankets they managed to make a third jacket to fit Olly and Jeanne. Two pairs of sweatpants became winter underwear. Clothing was no longer individual but held in common by two or three similarly built individuals, and worn as the need arose. They were now without soap, so their clothing began to stink and their limited number of socks to disintegrate.

The strangeness of their clothing was only another symptom of their dissociation from their previous lives. Just as they were physically, electronically, and geographically isolated from most of the rest of the planet, so too they were now in some way detached from the incredible events that had transformed the earth. The fear and hatred that the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere felt for refugees like themselves seemed to be natural and as blameless as the squalls that had afflicted them north of the equator—something to reef for. The destruction of much of the world by nuclear war seemed like a natural tragedy, as if the earth had been hit by some errant comet.

The plague did not reappear. After two weeks they dared to assume that they were free of that danger. They were healthy. They were starving. Bringing in a single fish was cause for a major celebration. The loss of a hooked fish before they had boarded it left them limp, empty, afraid. When their emergency cache of food was mostly gone, when they were down to a few days’ ration of dried fish, when all their previous stores of food were reduced to a few rotting potatoes and the last unopened, rusted can of Spam, they turned, filled with dread, again toward land.

Their lives, which for three weeks had taken on a peaceful, dreamlike quality brought about by their isolation and undernourishment, now, they feared, would once again take on the quality of a nightmare. They approached land feeling like aliens about to visit a foreign planet.

But the land came out to them. An Argentine frigate met them thirty miles off the coast and warned them through an electric bullhorn that no Norteamericanos were being allowed on the mainland of Argentina. If they came any closer to the coast their boat would be confiscated and they would be taken to the recently conquered Malvinas Islands with the other plague victims and illegal immigrants. They turned back out to sea.

Now sailing south seemed like an act of madness. They were sailing into winter, down toward the fiercest winds in the world, to the Straits of Magellan, to Cape Horn. They were sailing down to the very bottom of the civilized world, to a land so barren and infertile only the simplest and most impoverished Indian cultures had inhabited it until barely a century before. They were sailing away from man.

They had decided to try to sail through the Straits of Magellan to the Pacific. This proposal, which would have seemed so absurd, so impossible, two months before, seemed to all of them now to be inevitable and necessary. They had been driven south by forces beyond their control. Every time they had stopped running and tried to settle, they had been driven onward. Although the rest of the planet was silent now, all their radios silent, they sensed that where men were few and far from the holocaust, there peace might be found. To get to the islands of the South Pacific, they would have to round the tip of South America. So they would round it.

Strangely, even as they were turned away from land, the sea began again to feed them. They caught two large tuna, thirty pounds between them, at dusk of the very day they had been repulsed. They decided now to hold none of this blessing back, because they knew that all of them were near the end of their tethers. They decided to eat as if there were no tomorrow. “The Good Lord will provide,” Olly pronounced. “Occasionally.”

Watches had to be shortened to two hours, sometimes only one, because no one had the strength to stay at the helm any longer. Each person slept most of the time they weren’t needed in sailing the boat. Carpets, life preservers, and unused sails were used as extra blankets. As they moved farther south the seas grew bigger, the winds fierce. Neil, fighting to bring down the mainsail in sudden forty-knot winds, wrenched his back, sending it into spasms and effectively incapacitating him.

As the cold became worse and the work even more demanding Olly too took to bed. After standing his watch one morning he staggered down into the main cabin and fainted. Later, revived, he announced he was “feeling poorly” and would prefer a vacation. With Neil already bedridden, Olly’s dereliction made everyone realize how frail and bony he had become—a laughing skeleton, Philip had called him a few days earlier. He had a slight fever, complained of pains in his chest and belly, complained of a toothache, but what really ailed him couldn’t be pinned down. His illness left Jim and the two women to sail Vagabond alone. Thus now Jeanne and Sheila each had to take two-hour shifts at the helm alone in thirty- to forty-knot winds. And Vagabond, scarred and jury-rigged, as tired in her bones as her sailors in theirs, slashed and pounded dutifully forward, her sails tearing more often, fittings coming loose, but still going forward.

When they finally arrived at Cabo Virgenes at the eastern end of the Straits, they arrived, as Philip had predicted, in a gale. It blew out their working jib; they lost a halyard up the mast; they were almost blown onto a rocky shore before they regained control and retreated back out of the Strait to anchor in the lee of a point.

They had to remain anchored there for four days, waiting for the gale to blow itself out. They mended sail, caught a half-dozen small tasty fish on the bottom, and rested. They sent a party ashore to search for food. The shore was barren, windswept, all in gray and brown. They felt immense relief that there were no humans in the area. The late winter-early spring season meant that there was no green vegetation except in the water. They plucked at the few dried berries they found as at the most luscious of strawberries; dried grasses were picked to be their lettuce. Seaweed and shellfish were gathered from the tidal pools. Thankful for these meager winter remnants, the party returned to Vagabond to rest, Olly joining the Wellingtons to conserve body warmth in the aft cabin.

Neil, although still bedridden and frustrated by being unable to share in the sailing, nevertheless found himself strangely content. Instead of feeling alone and isolated, he felt as if he were at home surrounded by a loving family. Jeanne had sawed a hole in the wall separating their cabin from the main cabin so he was able to talk to the others. He had once or twice tried shouting orders from his bunk, but even as he did he realized his contributions weren’t needed. Philip and Sheila and Jim were all good sailors. Instead of making him feel unneeded, this awareness of his own superfluity was soothing. He could lie in his berth without the sense that unless he got himself up on deck in the bitter cold, Vagabond was doomed. The only thing that occasionally frightened him about his contentment was that it might be a sign that he was dying.

His own survival had given him hope for the group as well. He felt that down so far at the bottom of the world the disease called man might have escaped the fear and violence that was destroying the more civilized strains up north. Ultimately, he supposed, his feeling that they were going to make it was as absurd and groundless as his and Jeanne’s earlier conviction that they were doomed. Deep down he knew that even now, after all they had been through, Death could squash them all effortlessly with one casual blow.

Yet, for now, they still lived, and despite the hardships, they found in the tiny haven of their cabin a quiet and confident happiness that had always eluded Neil.

Life was reduced to eating, keeping warm, and companionship. The violent conflicts that wracked the rest of mankind seemed distant and trivial. A conversation between Neil and Jeanne one afternoon when Vagabond was at anchor, riding out the snow squalls and forty-knot winds, showed how detached they had become from their previous world. They were lying under a pile of covers in their berth.

“You know,” Neil said to Jeanne, “I’ve been thinking about how the war started.” He paused as if he were still thinking about it and then went on. “I’m not sure that the Russians fired the first salvo of missiles.”

Holding his hand as she lay beside him, Jeanne turned to look at him in the gray light of the late afternoon.

“You believed those Venezuelan broadcasts?” she asked, referring to programs they’d listened to more than a month earlier in which Venezuelan spokesmen had charged that the U.S. had started the war.

“No, not that,” Neil replied. “The thing that’s always bothered me is that the Russians attacked American cities and industries and military bases. We’re told they attacked missile sites, too, but one station way back at the beginning said something that I’ve never forgotten: they suggested that people flee to North and South Dakota to escape the fallout.”

Jeanne watched him as he paused, holding his gaze and waiting.

“I can’t help concluding that if the Russians didn’t hit South Dakota, it was because they knew there was nothing there to hit: all our missiles had already been fired.”

“If the Russians had struck first,” Jeanne prompted, “South Dakota would have been a primary target.”

“Yes.”

“So you think that the President gave the orders for a surprise attack?” she asked quietly.

“He wanted his nation to survive,” Neil replied. “He thought it was sit and get clobbered or strike first. He ordered the first strike for the same reasons that a Russian premier would have done it: out of fear that the enemy was desperate enough to do it, so he’d better do it first.”

Jeanne felt a distant sadness. She hadn’t really questioned the assumption of all the American radio stations that the Russians had struck first. She realized that she felt it was only natural that they would do it; Americans had been fearing they would attack for years. Yet she understood that that very fear, so pervasive, so hopeless, might have led an American government to do what Neil was speculating it had done. She felt no anger, only the distant sadness.

“The missiles fired at South Dakota targets might have been intercepted,” she suggested, “or might have missed on the first strike. And then after our Dakota-based missiles had been fired, the Russians left the area alone.” Even as she spoke, most of her mind was accepting Neil’s thesis.

“Yes, that’s possible,” agreed Neil. “I’d thought of that. But we know that the very first Soviet missiles hit American cities, targets that would always be vulnerable, whereas missile silos are worth hitting only on the very first strike, before they’ve launched their missiles.”

Jeanne looked at him.

“How does it make you feel?” she asked.

“It doesn’t make me feel much one way or another,” he replied. “It doesn’t change how hungry I am.” He smiled. “The two sides had gotten each other into a position where, sooner or later, someone was going to hit first. The fact that our government may have been the first to give in to that fear doesn’t really horrify me. The mistakes had already been made.”

Jeanne stared out the cabin window at the almost horizontal line of snowflakes rushing past.

“No wonder we’re outcasts.”

And later that same afternoon their talk brought them to a subject that gave them new vitality. When Neil, still huddled under the covers with Jeanne, had first discussed Lisa’s continuing weakness, he had expressed concern that Lisa might be pregnant, which, because the fetus’s development might have been impaired by her high fever, would put an added strain on her health. Jeanne had responded that Lisa had had a regular period a few days before the plague struck her, and then, looking puzzled, suddenly looked with a flush of joy at Neil.

“What are you thinking?” Neil asked, aware of something special happening with her.

“I just realized that… that I may be pregnant,” she said to him, looking half-joyful and half-awed.

Neil felt stunned. Their lovemaking had usually had an end-of-the-world desperation that was outside normal, everyday reality. Pregnancy belonged to the old world, not the ugly, tenuous one they now inhabited.

“My period’s overdue,” Jeanne went on, now looking uncertain. “I suppose it might just be… my wound… my worrying… diet…” She frowned as she considered these other explanations. But then she smiled again: she and Neil had made love without contraception during her most fertile time. In those days the possible consequences seemed irrelevant. Now they seemed divine. Even the shadow of the possible effects of her exposure to radiation didn’t dim her joy.

“Lovemaking does tend to create babies, I suppose,” Neil said to her, still somewhat dazed but with a grin on his face.

“Oh, Neil, I hope so, I hope so, I hope so,” Jeanne said, hugging him.

Bright-eyed, he looked down at her and then off through the window at the snow swirling past. He had a boyishly happy, faraway expression.

“Now, we’ll have to live,” he said dreamily. “Just to see if it’s a boy or a girl.”

But an hour later, as he struggled up on deck for the first time in a week, he knew that his puny aspirations would have nothing to do with it. Their lives—even the new one growing within Jeanne—still hung by a thread.

When the gale lessened and the wind shifted they sailed on through the Straits. They were sailing mechanically now, without real hope that they would ever see the Pacific, but sailing because all other alternatives were worse. They made barely a hundred miles over the first three days, sailing only during the eight hours of daylight, anchoring at night. Neil at least was able to stand watch again.

The absence of any sign of life during their first days in the Straits made them suspect that there couldn’t be a small bustling city only a little way off. As they neared the place in the Straits where their map showed Punta Arenas to be and they still had seen no boats, no smoke, no planes, they decided that there couldn’t be much of a military presence and thus humans in Punta Arenas might not be a threat, might, in fact, be helpful and sympathetic. So they proceeded to try it by day.

Uncertain of their exact location, they had almost sailed past the town when Philip spotted it through the binoculars three miles to the north—the charred wreckage of buildings and a few small houses on the hillsides. Nervously they altered course to sail over. Although the temperatures were in the forties the scene that drew toward them was bleak. All the buildings on the waterfront were blackened shells or had burned to the ground. The hulks of a large freighter and several smaller ships lay half-sunk along the waterfront. As they anchored off a burned-out wharf a few stray dogs scurried like overgrown rats among the blackened timbers of the wreckage. The hills above the town were brown and gray with only occasional patches of white from the recent snow. Nowhere was there any sign of human life. So fearful of man had those aboard Vagabond become that the emptiness of the city was as much a relief as a source of sadness. Neil, who had joined the others on deck, felt the same sense of being an alien on another planet that he had felt at each of their last landfalls.

They had lowered their dinghy into the water, and Jim, Neil, and Sheila were preparing to go ashore when two, three, and then half a dozen people appeared along one small section of unburned bulkhead fifty feet away. There were four men, a woman, and a child. Two of the men were carrying rifles. All were dressed in woolen ponchos and several wore the distinctive bowler hats of the Andes. The Chileans stared at the trimaran and its occupants, who stared back. Then one of the men with a rifle shouted something. Jeanne, frowning, shouted back in Spanish a request that he say it again. The man shouted the same thing a second time. Jeanne frowned a moment and consulted with Sheila.

“What’s he saying?” Neil asked.

“As near as we can tell,” said Jeanne with a puzzled smile on her face, “he’s saying—roughly translated—‘Hi, where the hell did you get that weird boat?’”

In the next two days, after making friends with the few Chileans who were still living in Punta Arenas, they gradually learned that the city had been destroyed in a brief war between Chile and Argentina ten weeks earlier. No one was certain why the war had started, although the two countries had long disputed over parts of Tierra del Fuego. It wasn’t even certain who had won the war, but Argentinian jets had destroyed the city and sunk most of the Chilean ships during the four days of fighting. With the city mostly destroyed, the Chilean government had ordered it evacuated, perhaps because they were obliged to under the peace treaty, perhaps because they were unwilling to spend money supplying it with food and fuel during the winter. Thousands of people had sailed off in freighters and navy ships for Santiago, leaving less than a hundred people who either chose to stay or got left behind out of ignorance. There was no phone, radio, road, or air contact between this part of Chile and the more civilized parts farther north. A single Chilean navy ship had turned up a month ago, looked around, and disappeared.

They also learned that Vagabond was not the only ship to have arrived since the town’s destruction. Six weeks before, an English sailboat had arrived, made some repairs, reprovisioned as best they could, and then sailed on. A damaged Dutch sloop had arrived three weeks earlier and was beached a mile to the east. A Romanian sailboat had arrived only three days before Vagabond. The small, wiry Chilean man in his thirties who had become their unofficial guide joked that Punta Arenas was becoming the “new French Riviera.”

They met the crews of both ships, and for Neil and the others, friendly people were unreal. The absence of threat was vaguely unnerving. The chance to live on land, perhaps in the shell of a house, seemed too good to be true. Food there was very scarce. Spring, although it officially began on September 21, the day they arrived, was still almost a month away. The friendly Chileans had no provisions to spare, but they did show the sailors where they could hunt small game—mostly rodents and wild dogs—and where they could gather shellfish.

It was unreal, too, to meet the three Dutchmen and one woman and her eight-year-old child who were making a winter home a mile east of Punta Arenas while they tried to repair their holed thirty-eight-foot Fiberglas sloop. Two of the Dutch spoke good English, as did one of the Romanians. They, along with six others, two of them women, had sailed a forty-eight-foot Fiberglas ketch all the way from the Black Sea. It was also anchored east of the wrecked town. Each of the crews was wary and suspicious of the other for a day or two. It wasn’t until they had shared the stories of their long voyages of survival that they all began not only to trust one another but to feel a bond of brotherhood. The Romanians, like those aboard Vagabond, were still in shock after being greeted with friendliness by fellow human beings.

The Dutch had fled Amsterdam on the first morning of the war, landing briefly in Portugal and again in the Canary Islands for supplies. They hadn’t encountered the resentment and violence that fleeing Americans had experienced; no one blamed the Dutch for the War. But conditions were harsh in the Canaries, the islands crowded with European refugees and food so scarce that aristocrats with millions of dollars in gold found it almost useless. The Dutch decided to sail across to Argentina, which, they thought, had plenty of food and would welcome them. When they landed in a small Argentinian fishing village, they learned they would lose their boat and be interned. They opted to try for the South Pacific.

The Romanians’ story was more harrowing. Vacationing on the Black Sea when the War began, they had all, including the three Communist Party members aboard, decided that the war was a meaningless disaster and chosen to run. By the time they got to the Bosphorus, a nuclear explosion had blocked the straits to all commercial and military traffic but they were able to sail through. They touched on North Africa only once, losing two of their shipmates in an attack by brigands, then escaped out through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. They stopped in Cape Verde to reprovision but found food so scarce they could obtain almost nothing. Sailing on, they’d been dismasted in a storm off Brazil, spent three weeks in a jungle south of the Amazon fitting another mast, and then sailed on. They too had been attacked by a jet, an Argentine jet, but it had fired just once, missed literally by a mile, and then flown off.

Both the Dutch and the Romanians seemed surrealistically skinny and bony at first, until Neil realized that he must look even worse.

It took Neil and Jeanne and the others only two days to decide that their plan to sail on soon to the South Pacific was madness born of their desperation. They had no food and little prospect of getting much until the summer offered a chance to plant and harvest crops. Jeanne was pregnant, Lisa and Olly still very weak, although both were out of bed now. Sheila and Jeanne had pulled two of Olly’s rotting teeth a week earlier, and his debilitating low-grade fever was disappearing. He had recovered sufficiently to pinch Sheila’s behind and begin entertaining himself and others again with monologues.

On their third day they moved Vagabond east to beach her closer to the other sailboats. The terrain was desolate: the few trees were twisted like grotesque cripples by the fierce westerly winds. Aboard Vagabond as Philip and Sheila and Lisa began preparing to cook a wild dog Jim had caught and killed, Olly suggested a barbecue. Philip said that of course that was the easiest way to cook, the only way, but Olly shook his head.

“I mean a real barbecue,” he said. “With people, talk, laughter. You know, like they do on Smith Island.”

“You mean… invite other people?” asked Jeanne.

“Sure,” said Olly. “Shit, this poor critter’s so thin and bony, none of us gonna get fat anyhow, but we got to give him his self-respect, make him feel he’s worthy of dying for us.”

They all stared at him. Share their first meat in a month?

“Who’ll we invite?” asked Jeanne.

“Well, those fellas with the funny round hats for one,” said Olly.

“Everyone,” said Neil.

“What?” said Philip.

“We’ll invite everyone,” Neil repeated almost dreamily. “We’ll invite everyone…”

“By God, that’s a bloody good idea, Neil,” Philip said, grinning, “To share with friends again, even if it leaves us back with dried grasses and barnacles.”

“Don’t criticize barnacles, dear,” said Sheila. “Lisa and I are concocting a marvelous barnacle salad.”

“Save it for the barbecue,” said Neil. “Save everything good. Tomorrow we’ll share every bit of food we have so we can start from scratch.”

“Bit mad, I suppose,” said Philip, still smiling. “Still, it beats hoarding…”

Jim was the official messenger, and he spoke first to their little Chilean guide, who nodded and looked pleased and hurried away to tell his friends.

But the Dutch were confused and wary.

“You want to share your food with us?” the oldest Dutchman asked, frowning.

“Yes,” said Jim. “But… but we only have the dog. We… don’t have much else to eat or drink. It’s—”

“It’s what you call ’potluck’, no?” the Dutchman said, smiling.

“And ’Bring your own bottle,’ ” added another, also smiling.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Jim. “But you don’t have to bring anything…”

“Well, we’ll come,” said the oldest Dutchman. “We’ll come with much thanks.”

The Romanians were even more dumbfounded. Jim could sense that they suspected some kind of trap. They had greeted him with their rifles at port arms. They whispered together in Romanian, glancing at him nervously.

“Why you do this?” the Romanian captain asked after he had finally understood Jim’s invitation. “You have much food?”

“No,” said Jim. “But… we want… we decided… to share what we have…”

“You want us share our food too, no?”

Jim frowned. “We want to share our food with you,” he finally said. “It seems… right to us. That’s all.”

“We bring our guns?”

“I guess so,” Jim replied. “We don’t have any guns.”

“Ah… no guns…”

“We’d… be honored if you’d come eat with us,” Jim repeated.

“Honored, yes,” echoed the Romanian, looking puzzled. “Well, maybe we come. We see.”

“Two o’clock,” said Jim.

“Two o’clock, yes. Well… And meat, you say? Well… And honor… yes… Maybe we come.”

And so at two o’clock the next afternoon the five Dutch and seven Romanians and twelve Chileans came. The Dutch and Romanians approached as warily as if they were threading their way through a minefield. The Chileans, having already accepted the weirdness of their latest visitors, came fearlessly. The Dutch brought their last flask of wine and a specially baked loaf of bread—their first in a week. The Romanians brought a tiny tin—their last—of caviar, and a freshly caught and baked fish. The Chileans brought a basket of corn and some of their homemade wine. No one brought guns.

And they ate. And though each was limited to a small cup of wine, a single cob of corn, and a few bites of tough stringy dogmeat, they ate happily. And slowly, very slowly, it began to dawn on each of Vagabond’s crew members that they might live. For Neil it was the friendliness of the Chileans and the Dutch and the Romanians, expressed primarily in exaggerated gestures of delight at the feast and continual smiles, that made him realize that some deep part of him had begun to feel that he would be running and on the edge of death forever. Now the act of sharing the treasured bit of wine with Jacob and his friends, and a pipeful of tobacco with one of the Romanians, altered his view of things entirely. The running, at long last, was over. The Romanians and Dutch had decided, as they had, to remain in the Straits at least through the summer. Although everyone left in the destroyed city was on starvation rations—Vagabond was now in fact totally out of food—fishing in the Straits was good, there were small animals to be hunted, and spring was now only a few weeks away.

To the north the wars they had fled were presumably continuing. Here, at the bottom of the world, a few survivors had gathered. They still were struggling to survive, but now with each other rather than against. It was a small first step on the long voyage back.

It was Olly who summed up the new feeling. He came up to Neil and Jeanne after an hour of feasting and mingling and unfolding his monologues with the two dozen strangers, few of whom understood him. There were tears in his eyes.

“I been feeling funny,” he said to them, “and I think I finally figured out what it is…” He looked up at them, a laughing skeleton. “I may have to get used to living again…”