“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.