To which I had agreed.
“She had friends. Three of the women got together and came over. They played some card game with her, and they all laughed a lot, and whispered among themselves, and told about their children. It lasted about four hours, and when it was over they came to me in a group, all three of them came, and they said there wasn’t anything the matter with Janice, she was perfectly fine and maybe she had been upset or something. As soon as they left, it was just like it had been before. Nothing had changed.”
The little man had leaned forward, suddenly intense. “She could turn it on and turn it off. She was only crazy when she wanted to be. Try to understand!”
And I had told him, “They can be very deceptive, I know.”
The little man had slumped as if exhausted. “She tried to set fire to the house three times, Mr. Grison. She’d wait until I was asleep, then get up and try to set fire to the house, and there was nobody but me to take care of her. I was in there with her, there in the house alone with her. I was all alone.”
It’s what we do when we’re all alone. We kill.
Here are the guns the captain gave me, right here in my belt. Guns are for that time. The police will protect us—but not when we need their protection. Our government will protect us, until we need its protection. The UN will protect us, so long as it doesn’t violate the UN’s great unwritten rule: In disputes between the third world and the NAU, always side with the third world.
How much help is the third world giving the human race against the Os? The Europeans are fighting, even though we spy on them and they on us. The Greater Eastasians are fighting, too, while spying on the NAU and the EU—perhaps because the NAU and the EU spy on them. The SAU’s fighting itself, and so is bound to win, and lose.
As for the rest … We think of their people as poor and hungry, and so they are. The governments that have robbed them of everything are waiting now to despoil us. Those governments are poor and hungry, too. As poor, and as hungry, as so many vultures.
The captain and I, alone and frightened here on this ship, are humanity in the same way that the word represents the thing. Or if not humanity, then Western civilization. Here, I am the law and the ideal of justice, the ideal our masters have forgotten—the ideal they would spit upon if they recalled it. I am justice, law, and civilization; and I am going to fight like a rat in a corner.
A cornered rat with two pistols and a submachine gun.
8. GOING DOWN
“You come down!”
The shouter was on the Main Deck, clearly visible in the moonlight. “Come down quick or we shoot!” One of his companions clarified that statement by shooting, his rifle pointed almost vertically up.
The shot was answered by what sounded like a string of obscenities from the topgallant yard of Number 5 Mast.
“Missed ’em,” the captain whispered. “Nobody fell.”
Skip nodded. They were watching from the dubious shelter of a veranda overlooking the stern.
“Four of them are bunched up there. Do you think you can get them with that machine gun?”
Before Skip could shake his head, there was a shot from the fantail, aft of Number 6 Mast. The flash, a pinprick of yellow flame smaller than a spark, was gone in an instant; the report, half lost in the immensity of the silent sea, small and weak.
Yet the hijacker with the rifle lurched forward, his steps awkward and uneven. He bent, crumpled, and fell on his face. The remaining three opened fire, joined by three others some distance away.
Skip vaulted the railing without a moment’s thought.
He landed, perhaps fortunately, on a seventh who had been running onto the open deck. Afterward, he could not recall how he had gotten to his feet or how his submachine gun had gotten from his back to his bruised hands, only stumbling toward the men he felt certain must be shooting at Chelle, hearing the captain’s shots behind him, and dropping to one knee before firing a short burst—the submachine gun leaping and shaking in his grip, although it seemed then that he heard no shots, neither his own nor the shot fired by the lone man at the base of the mast, who turned and fired before he fell.
He stood, no longer shooting; and the captain shouted up to the men on the topgallant yard: “Get down here! See those weapons? They’re yours. Come down and claim them.”
After that, he was in Chelle’s arms, and she in his, although he did not relax his grip on his submachine gun.
“They’ll come,” he said. “They must have heard us.”
“Out of that door there.” She pointed. “One at time, with the light behind them. Want to bet I can’t go five for five?”
* * *
They held their meeting in the first-class tearoom, a place of polished wood, old framed prints, and fine china. All four of them were tired and more than a little baffled.
“If they scuttle,” Chelle said, “they’ll drown first. I don’t think they’ll do it.”
“They will or they won’t,” Vanessa told her. “Nothing in this world is less predictable than a frightened man.”
The captain chuckled.
“It’s the truth! Women are criers, screamers, or fighters. If I know the woman, I can tell you exactly what she’ll do. Men … Well, it depends on thousand things.”
Chelle said, “Skip wasn’t frightened. He jumped that rail like a tiger. I saw him and you didn’t.”
“If he wasn’t frightened, he doesn’t count. Were you, Skip? I was hiding behind a ventilator and so was Chelle.”
“Afterward,” Skip told her. “Only afterward. They were trying to kill Chelle, half a dozen of them.”
Chelle made a rude noise. “I was firing from cover, not hiding, and those dumbfucks couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.”
The captain said, “We can argue about that later. The hijackers in the hold are our present problem. What can we do about them?”
“Rush ’em,” Chelle said. “Keep them waiting for two or three days, then rush ’em.”
Mildly, Skip said, “What if they scuttle?”
“We escape in the boats and they drown.”
Vanessa asked, “Would we have time to launch the lifeboats, Richard?”
“Yes, but we’d lose the ship, and we might die in the boats. Or some of us might.”
Skip said, “We’re not as strong as they think we are. I tried to fool them at the parley, and I succeeded. Don’t question that, please—it will just waste time. I fooled them, but they may not stay fooled. If they don’t, they may rush us.”
Chelle said, “Cool! Let ’em try it.”
“They may.” Skip leaned forward.
The captain laid a notebook on the table. “Let’s list our options. We can rush them, or we can wait for them to rush us. Anything else?”
Vanessa said, “How well can you steer without the rudders? Well enough to get us back to the NAU?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Mr. Reuben is trying to find out, steering with the sails. If you mean mainland North America, I think you can forget it. It’s too far, and we’d be tacking. How do you tack without a rudder?”
“I have no idea.”
“Neither do I, and I doubt that it could be done. A fore-and-aft rig might manage something, but we’re square-rigged.”
Chelle said, “Aren’t there a lot of islands?”
“Yes, and we were going to visit a few of them. But they’re well east of our position, and the prevailing winds have been driving us southwest. We can counter that to some extent. Maybe we could even counter it enough to slip between Grenada and Tobago and round the shoulder of South America. That would buy us time, and we might be rescued.”