The object he led me to did not deserve the name of boat. It was a filthy, broken-sided scow, its flat well littered with items of rubbish.
“This!” I hissed at him. “We’ll never get to Glen Echo in this.”
He grinned at me, teeth white in a nearly invisible face. “No, we won’t. This is what I came here in, but it won’t take us back. I did my scouting in it, and it will take us to the real boat.”
“Why didn’t you bring the ’real boat’ here?”
“You’ll see. Let’s get you aboard. Sorry, but you have to get your feet wet.”
He helped me splash through a foot of water and hoisted me effortlessly over the side. More proof, if I needed it, of his physical strength. He settled me aft, went to the bow, and picked up a paddle. “We can talk now if you want,” he said. “But we’ll come to a place where we have to be real quiet. I’ll let you know ahead of time. Sit back and relax.”
I was too tired to talk, and too uncomfortable to sleep. We moved onto the dark water and slipped lazily downstream. The wrong direction for Glen Echo, but Seth seemed to know what he was doing.
After about an hour we passed a couple of moored sailboats. “Those,” I said.
Seth shook his head. “Flat calm. We need engines.”
Twenty minutes later we came to an inlet where recent high water must have created a strong whirlpool. The shallows were full of flotsam, everything from tree limbs and wooden crates and beams of timber, to a miscellany of shattered light boats and the wreckage of a light aircraft.
“Pity we don’t have us one of them, in working condition.” Seth grunted. He pointed to the plane. “We’d be at your place in half an hour. Course, we’d need parachutes, too — I reckon nobody’s wavin’ you in to land these days at local airfields. Now we’ve got to be pretty quiet. Nothing but whispers. We’re nearly there.”
He was appallingly cheerful. I wondered if I had cast my lot in with a madman.
In reality, I had not cast anything. I hadn’t picked Seth. He, together with his two friends, had picked me. That pair was much on my mind. They knew that I was awake. Even were Seth to vanish into the great hereafter, I would know no peace so long as they knew what had happened, and were in a position to talk.
Be patient. I had little choice.
Seth stopped paddling. In silence, we drifted up to another boat. It was a squat oblong, painted some distasteful color that looked in the dim light to be a drab olive-green. Two small outboard motors hung at the rear, propellers out of the water.
“Mil spec,” Seth whispered. “Old, but these mothers were made to run forever. An’ it has half a tankful.”
“It’s chained up.”
“It sure is. Don’t know how near the owner might be. That’s why you gotta be real quiet now. When we go, we go fast — no stoppin’ to pick up passengers. Climb in, I’ll hold us steady.”
Exhaustion made me clumsy. Seth had to be wincing as I stood up and toppled from the scow into his new find. The thump when I hit the bottom boards seemed to carry across the whole river. I crawled to the middle of the boat and lay there. Seth released his hold on the scow and came over the side as silently as a dark-clad ghost.
He lowered the outboard motors into position. The clicks as he primed them with fuel were audible to me, but I suspect that from the shore they sounded no louder than insect noises.
Seth slipped loose the chain securing the boat at its bow to a solid post on the shore, and lowered it link by link into the river. He came to my side and bent close.
“According to the control setting, the two motors are power-matched and synchronized.” His whisper was barely audible, a mere breath of sound. “I can’t tell if they are until I start them. Grab hold of something and hang on tight. I’m going to full power right away. Things might be messy at first.”
I saw his teeth. The lunatic was grinning at me.
“That’s if we’re lucky,” he went on. “If we’re not, and the motors won’t start, we’ll be sittin’ ducks for anybody who comes out to see what all the noise is. We can’t have that. So if we don’t have power inside half a minute, you and me have to get out of here. We’ll go over the side. Don’t worry none about drowning, ’cause I’ll hold you up.”
He moved forward to the little cabin and the controls, giving me no opportunity to ask, We go into the river, and then what?
I lay flat and clutched a center post around which a thick rope was neatly coiled. It should have been around Seth’s neck. I had been better off than this in judicial sleep. An electric motor hummed a few feet aft, followed by the racheting racket of a pair of starters. Our efforts could no longer be mistaken for insect noises. The insect to produce so loud a sound would be the size of a horse.
The starter motors clattered on and on. I was bracing myself for the plunge into cold river water when suddenly the gasoline engines fired in unison. The noise level went from frightening to monstrous as Seth — too soon, the engines were still cold — gave them full throttle.
The engines coughed, spit, backfired, and finally hit a rhythm. The boat surged forward on a curving course that would run us right into the riverbank. Seth turned us at the last moment, juggled the power of one engine, and headed for midriver.
He turned to grin at me.
“Synchronized, my ass.” He had to shout to be heard above the engines. “But we’re doing fine now. Once we’re half a mile out, I’m going to take the power up all the way. Then we head upstream. And you can have a sleep” — on the bare boards of a pitching boat, surrounded by a din loud enough to burst eardrums — “and dream about home, sweet home.”
Home, sweet home. Seth seemed oddly confident about what we would find there, and I suppose that was my fault.
In my eagerness to assure him that I would be able to provide equipment to monitor the condition of his and his companions’ telomeres, I had omitted to discuss one crucial point. Not about the scientific techniques, which were every bit as simple as I had suggested. Given a few hours in my home lab, I could put together a sequence of observational methods and wet chemistry tests to replace the role of the defunct genome sequencers.
There was, however, a default assumption in all this; namely, that my home lab still existed.
The law admitted an odd ambivalence regarding the property rights of individuals sentenced to judicial sleep. On the one hand, I and others like me were alive. New evidence establishing our innocence might one day be discovered, and we would then be resuscitated. It would thus be wrong to confiscate our possessions or to apply inheritance laws while we were still alive.
On the other hand, someone sentenced to centuries of judicial sleep, with overwhelming evidence of guilt, had a negligible chance of ever waking. We might, however, live for seventy or eighty years, until at last we died in our sleep of natural causes. What, during all that time, was to be done with our property?