Vagabond sailed on, the mood of her ship’s company heavy. The paltry meals, unvaried, sparsely seasoned; the stink of the fish steaks drying in the sun; the stiffness of clothes washed in salt water; the familiar grizzled faces and unkempt hair of one’s fellow crewmen day after day; the constant surge, sway, and smash of Vagabond; the constant hunger, and the suspicion that others were somehow eating more; the depressing reports from the outside world of war, disease, starvation, and violence spreading faster than they could escape them—all these oppressed them. Olly, who usually spent an hour every day telling stories to Skippy, now puffed violently on his unlit pipe. Katya and Tony were lovers, then fought bitterly, then were lovers again. Lisa and Jim, like two beings from some other planet, moved gingerly among them, doing their work, then retreating to Jim’s guitar, Lisa’s diary, long whispered conversations on the fore-deck. Neil, Frank, and Jeanne, caught in a tense tangle that couldn’t last, lived each day according to the rules of routine and decency, then each retired to loneliness.
They sailed on. The squalls that hit them four days after leaving Great Abaco eased the water problem. To gather water all the self-bailing cockpits were stoppered and even the inflatable dinghy was brought up on the foredeck and partially inflated to catch water. They gathered two and a half gallons in the first ten-minute downpour and close to six additional gallons in the two heavier showers that followed.
After the squalls the wind shifted to the south, the seas grew calmer, and Vagabond began a long tack directly toward San Juan. With the reduced weight of both man and material—the ship’s company had already shed almost a hundred pounds—Vagabond began to race toward San Juan at almost a hundred and eighty miles a day.
A week after they left the Bahamas, when they were less than eighty miles northwest of San Juan, the outer world, the one they were trying to escape, the one they were trying to rejoin, paid them another visit. It was after one a.m. when a sudden glow lit the distant horizon ahead of them, bloomed briefly like a bright flower, and warned the watchers that man had again unleashed his madness on man.
They reacted to this explosion over San Juan not with terror but with a kind of bewildered automatism. It seemed somehow so wrong, so unjust, that after fleeing for almost three weeks and for over two thousand miles they should find ahead of them still more; they could feel no emotion except despair.
Jim and Lisa, on watch, turned Vagabond off the wind to sail away from the explosion, Lisa going crisply to the winches to let out the sails—as if responding to this explosion were a normal part of their nautical duties. At Jim’s call Neil came hurriedly up on deck, saw the light, which was now astern of them, and went to the helm to check the course. Disoriented, he took a half-minute to realize that it was probably San Juan that had been hit. After calculating their approximate position, he ordered Jim to alter course back to the east. They would have about two hours before the tidal wave would reach them; only then would they turn to run before it. Because of the immense depth of water he guessed that the wave wouldn’t be breaking and would probably be less of a threat than the wave in the shallow Chesapeake. Meanwhile they would head east, toward the Virgin Islands. When Neil took out the transistor radio and tuned it to their usual station in San Juan, they found it was no longer broadcasting.
The tidal wave overtook them in the early morning hours on schedule; a wave a little less than twenty-five feet high appeared among the three-foot seas that had been running earlier. Frank was at the helm with Tony, Neil sleeping in the wheelhouse behind; they saw it almost at the last moment, a huge wall of water glistening in the light of the moon. Frank swung Vagabond away to run before it, but the gigantic, unbreaking swell hit them on the aft quarter. Vagabond lurched violently, skidded along the wave at tremendous speed as she was carried like a toy for forty or fifty feet, and then lurched again as she toppled back to starboard at the crest and the wave rolled under her like the back of a mammoth whale. The huge sea was followed by several other large waves in the fifteen-to-twenty-foot range, but by then Frank had swung Vagabond downwind and she was running before them, surfing down their faces sometimes for a half-minute and setting him to grinning with incongruous exhilaration at Vagabond’s speed and grace under pressure. Neil awoke with a shout after the first smash and, groggy with sleep, began to shout out contradictory orders, but Frank, having survived the first awful wall of water, was not much concerned with Vagabond’s handling the puny little fifteen-footers. He just grinned at Neil and kept doing what he was doing.
The sunrise the following morning showed them a terrible beauty. The whole southeast became a glowing sweep of bright reds and oranges such as none of them had ever seen before. Already above them high, dark clouds were spreading out across the sky, tinged now with the most delicate pink but, as the sun rose higher, shading to tannish yellow, then brown, then a brownish gray, and finally and simply to the all-pervading, thick, dull gray that they had so hated and feared over the Chesapeake.
By nine a.m. San Juan was about seventy miles to the southwest. Sailing east, they were moving in the opposite direction from the high altitude flow of radioactivity, which was westerly. Yet even sailing at eight knots, they didn’t gain on the expansion of the cloud; it spread outward from its center faster man they could flee. When the familiar terrifying ash first appeared on their decks, Neil once again ordered everyone below and had Tony dress in foul-weather gear to sweep the decks clean. By the time he had finished just the first cleanup, he was collapsing from the heat and, calling out weakly, had to be helped down into the main cabin. Neil had developed a technique of steering Vagabond by compass from below, since the steering cables passed down from the wheel at the rear of the main cabin and could be pulled alternately to adjust Vagabond’s course. The decks could be swept down every twenty minutes or so by someone as well-protected as Tony had been, but no one dressed for the Arctic had to be on deck to steer.
By noon, three hours after the first traces of ash had been discovered, they were no longer able to see any evidence of additional fallout. The dark cloud was mostly west and south of them, only a thin gray layer directly above.
It was Captain Olly who seemed most disturbed by the latest explosion. Neil discovered him late that afternoon sitting forward on the starboard hull, staring blankly out at the gray water to the southeast of them. Neil realized he must have been sitting there for hours.
“What’s happening, old fellow?” Neil asked him, holding on to a stainless-steel shroud for balance. Vagabond was rolling and plunging uncomfortably as she reached eastward in the southerly wind.
“Feeling a little poorly,” Olly answered after a brief pause.
“Your stomach?” Neil asked, concerned about radiation sickness.
“My heart,” said Olly.
“My God, what’s the matter?”
“Not that heart,” said Olly irritably. “I mean… I mean that dust gets me down.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mind explosions or tidal waves or fires or big winds. A sailor’s meant to have to deal with those. But when it rains death, how do you reef for that?”
Neil didn’t answer. They stared out at what seemed to be an ugly gray sea beneath the cloud bank to the south.