“I’ll shift the battery over so we can use the depthmeter,” Frank said gently to Neil and went below.
“Can you reef the mizzen?” Sheila asked.
“Yes. Why?” asked Neil
“If we have to… to try to tack offshore, the mizzen could help us come about.”
Come about? In this? With no dagger board! Neil felt like crying.
“I don’t think I could even get Vagabond in irons, much less bring her about,” he said quietly.
“Then it’s in the hands of the gods,” said Sheila softly.
“One of them’s sure as hell got to be a better sailor than I am,” Neil commented bitterly, thinking again of Katya.
And so they sailed on. Using the depthmeter and a local chart that Sheila had brought over to Vagabond with the gear from Doubloon, Neil guessed what the time was when they cleared the tip of St. Thomas and what their course should be to clear Dog Rocks! He sent Tony forward to listen for the surf breaking ahead. Frank brought up the boat’s twelve-volt spotlight to search ahead occasionally too. Neil turned the helm over to Sheila so that he could concentrate all his meager resources on determining Vagabond’s probable speed, leeway, and direction, plotting her progress on Sheila’s chart, and ordering the minor course changes that might let them get a little bit farther over to windward.
And in the blackness of that night the sounds of waves crashing against rocks or reef less than a hundred yards away no less than three times terrified them into preparing for disaster, yet they somehow sailed through. At one point, when Sheila was wielding the spotlight, they saw surf shattering itself against a reef less than forty feet off to port. At another point Vagabond struck something—probably, since their depthmeter was registering eight feet of water, a little shaft of coral—but she sailed on.
By midnight the storm winds, as Philip and Neil had expected so long ago in their initial planning session, moved around to the southwest and the seas and wind began to fall. Free now of the last of the little cays and reefs, they were able to sail easily due east. It was just possible, thought Neil, as he came back up on deck after checking on Philip and Jeanne, that they might survive this night after all. They would live to suffer another day.
Part Five
SPIRIT
The “War”—the holocaust, the war of missiles, bombers, submarines, lasers, satellites, and all the sophisticated technology of modern military science—this war between the United States with its Western and Oriental allies and the Soviet Union with her allies, was over. No more missiles were being fired; nuclear explosions had ceased. Although death still came out of the sky, it fell now gently, subtly, like a soft rain. Although people still died, they no longer disappeared in a flash of light or exploded into fragments like a smashed pumpkin, but died in more natural animal ways: of starvation, of typhoid, of cholera, of dysentery, of pneumonia, of weariness, and of grief. Although no victory had been declared, no defeat acknowledged, the big war was over. Another had begun.
The new war, in a tradition as old as humanity itself, found the former enemies fighting on the same side against new enemies. Those who had survived the first war, often finding themselves with radioactive food and undrinkable water, with diseases known and unknown afflicting them and medical care scarce or absent, fled to those places that they supposed to be safer. The southern nations were first appalled by the invasion, then frightened, and finally angered by it. If the white nations of the north had blown up the world, let them not try to escape the consequences by fleeing south. Thus the new war had begun. It actually had been going on since the first week of the “War.”
Venezuela’s navy had forcibly prevented U.S. Navy ships from refueling in their ports. In the ensuing sea battle tactical nuclear bombs had been dropped. In miniature such battles had been repeated throughout the world ever since. American and Russian ships and planes, low on fuel, their home bases destroyed, sought refuge in neutral countries to the south. At first their ships or planes were impounded, their crews quarantined or interned. Later they were sunk or shot down, the survivors killed on the spot. As the warring nations slowly stopped being nations, so too did their armies, navies, and air forces slowly stop being armies, navies, and air forces. Individual units—a ship, a plane, a company of infantry, a tank squadron—began mini-invasions on their own. Soon any unidentified or foreign ship, plane, or person was considered an enemy to be eliminated. When the unknown epidemic that came to be called either “the plague” or “Nevada X” began to spread from the American West down through Mexico to Central America, and, in long, deadly bursts, to other countries around the world, foreigners, especially Americans, were feared, resented, and resisted all the more. To protect themselves the southern nations simply shut down all commercial air and sea traffic with the Northern Hemisphere. In effect they tried to build a wall and order the “War” and those who survived it not to enter.
Within the nations of the Southern Hemisphere other walls were also built. The rich retreated to their luxury homes and apartments and tried to keep the police and the military forces in line. In the West Indies and Central America the desperate and starving masses had already risen up and forcibly taken from those who still had something all that they had. Slow starvation and susceptibility to disease thus became universal. In South America, where food still was available and disease less rampant, the rich were able to hold on while the great masses of people, unemployed and barely fed, became weaker and weaker, more and more desperate.
And so, a third war was beginning: a war that was again as old as humanity, but was exacerbated by the gross overpopulation in the late twentieth century: the war between those who had enough to eat and those who did not. The governments of South America held out: shooting everyone who resisted, shooting all who tried to cross their borders, shooting everyone who questioned the siege mentality that they hoped would sustain them.
And thus throughout the world the war refugees were fighting a usually losing battle for survival. The “War” was over. The survivors didn’t notice.
The “convoy” composed of Vagabond and Scorpio was reunited off the northern coast of Anguilla late in the afternoon of the day following their escape from St. Thomas. Olly and Jim had brought Scorpio through the wild, bone-jarring hundred-mile passage, but only after blowing out two sails, developing frightening leaks that had them pumping almost continuously, and having Gregg’s arm broken.
With the wind and seas much diminished and their ships anchored off the lee shore of Anguilla, those on Vagabond and Scorpio transported supplies, adjusted ship’s crews, established radio frequencies and hours of transmission, as well as signaling procedures and defense strategies in case of attack, and set their course and rendezvous points in case they unexpectedly lost sight of each other. But even as they took heart from their safe passage Lisa reported to Neil something that Katya had mentioned briefly as they were fleeing the pirate estate: Lisa and Katya had apparently smoked a joint with a plague victim aboard Mollycoddle. In Katya’s brief, emotional account of her capture and imprisonment she had warned Neil tearfully that a black girl aboard Mollycoddle had been thrown overboard when Michael had realized how feverish she was. Katya had hysterically offered not to sail with them, but Neil had been obsessed with getting back to Mollycoddle and out to sea and had barely understood. And if he had, he still would have brought her along.