Long Voyage Back (52 page)

Neil still stared stiffly aft, Olly, behind him, stroking his wispy white beard and scowling. Ì 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 fearfully 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 further aft and stared out at Vagabond's wake. He had felt instant anger at Jeanne's acting behind his back, fear too at the unexpected loss of weapons he thought he needed to survive, but with the voices of Sheila and Olly echoing Jeanne, he felt an unexpected peacefulness replace his anger. The guns were gone. They themselves were 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 weren't, the odds were way 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 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 caused by the new horrors. He could feel her yielding only slightly in his embrace. 'We haven't had much hick holding off Death with guns, so it can't be much worse without.'

At dawn they were still ten 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 long before made contingency plans for both air and sea attacks, and, being weaponless, 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 with whom they had no radio contact. As the jet shrieked past and began to climb and turn he shouted at everyone to go down into Frank'

s cabin. He himself dashed below to prepare the flares. He didn't know whether the jet would return or attack if it did, but as Olly and Sheila passed him carrying Philip they exchanged with him pained glances: the look of people marching to a battle they didn't expect to win.

As he emerged 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, around, and back towards 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 flew rapidly at them and Neil experienced the brief image of a man facing a firing squad. Then 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 of the cabins within seconds as Neil returned to prepare to light one of the light flares. The missile had struck at least a half-mile in front of Vagabond but he doubted the pilot had been able to follow it. As the jet rose and swept 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 one apparent hit. But the jet returned. As Neil watched in bitter dread and lit his third flare it came in and 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 m front of them. The bright flash of the lit flare must have seemed to the pilot - if he could see it, which was doubtful - a direct hit. The jet roared over the smoke-enshrouded trimaran and Neil, coughing and being overcome with 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. Dark black smoke was pouring out of two of Vagabond's cabins into the sky.

Neil's hands were black and one hand had been burned in lighting the third-flare. Jeanne and the others looked at him as if asking for 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 at.

The jet didn't return a fourth time. It returned to Brazil, apparently confident it had prevailed in its battle with the trimaran.

After five minutes of waiting, with the smoke gradually getting worse even in the closedoff port cabin, Neil and Olly went back on deck. Both smoke flares were going out, but something was still burning in the galley. Neil had to go down and extinguish a smouldering rug. The whole inside of the main cabin was black with the smoke. The others now climbed out of Jeanne's cabin to survey the wreckage, but there was no wreckage. The multi-milliondollar aircraft had fired two highly sophisticated missiles at the plywood and fibreglass sailing boat but, as Neil explained, the missiles had been metal-seeking or heat-seeking missiles. Vagabond, engineless, was without heat and had so little metal in her aluminium spars that the missile couldn't seek it out. The pilot had been trained to fire at a general area and let the missile do the fine tuning. Vagabond and her survivors had been saved by modern technology.

Two hours later they raised sails 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 another sixty miles and thus 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 towards the equator, the heat and humidity became stupefying; only the recurrent squalls, by keeping their supply of water adequate, kept them alive and sane. All Neil 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 their bodies. The seawater was twenty degrees cooler than the air and they used it continually. But over the next three days the fevers raged on. Twice Lisa went into convulsions, twice she survived. Jim jabbered on in some otherworldly hallucination about snow and cold and the bottom of the world, sometimes giggling hysterically.

On the third day from the onset, after Lisa had had her second set of convulsions, Neil came down into the cabin to see Jeanne up on the berth with Lisa, her face buried on Lisa's naked chest and neck, sobbing. For a moment Neil thought that Lisa must have died; a wave of sadness immobilized him. Then he became aware of 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 the diseased body of Lisa was almost a form of suicide.

Neil could feel rising in him his old rage against the gods or Fate or Death or the war or whatever was pursuing them so relentlessly and now appearing to win. He felt a rage at Jeanne for letting 'them' know they were winning. But then, recalling his helplessness, it passed. He went up to the edge of the berth and gently pulled her off the berth and, as she wailed and resisted, 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 soapy rag inside her lips 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 below 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 lying on 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 the cabin's bilge. Forty minutes later he went to see Jeanne in her cabin. She was there 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. Ì 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?'

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.'

Ì see,' said Neil. 'That I can't help.'

`Nor can I,' said Jeanne.

Ànd I still miss you.'

Ì know,' she whispered.

`There are no barriers between us now,' Neil said gently, èxcept those we erect in our own hearts.'

Ì 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 only a dancing on a hot griddle before the end.'

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

`Still,' he finally managed. 'Dancing is better than nothing.'

Ùntil 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 in which, paradoxically, he didn't believe. 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 consciousness began to clear, Frank was surprised at the space he was in. His anger at and jealousy of Neil was totally gone. His earlier decision to separate from Jim, Jeanne and his friends seemed that of a total madman. He knew it had come from his resentment and sadness at losing Jeanne, but now 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 hiccoughs.

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 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 which had let things happen: they could die knowing they deserved it, but not their children. We are the single 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 with equanimity his own fate, he felt a quiet fury at the reality that had been 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 seemed now so trivial compared to the Big Failure; all his aspirations so selfish compared to the one 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 the flow of events in motion. The creative capability of 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 percentage of errors.

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

`You look like you're the one who got shot,' he said. She looked startled and didn't smile. Ì'm sorry Lisa's sick, Jeannie,' he went on, aware that his strange lightness was out of place with her now.

`How are you, Frank?' she rejoined, finally centring her attention on him.

`Pretty good,' he answered. 'Even dying.'

`You're not dying, Frank,' she said urgently.

Ìt doesn't matter, dying's not what it's cracked up to be,' Frank went on, aware that he might be feverish. 'And I'm sorry I butted in between you and Neil.'

`That's not important now.'

Ì know it's not,' Frank said. ' But I still wanted to tell you.' Ì'm sorry I can't love you as 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 uncertain if he were 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 about 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.