Neil passed this along to everyone and ordered them to always use the same personal cup for drinking and the same plate and utensils for eating. Oscar and his shipmates insisted that Jim and Lisa be transferred back to Vagabond. This was done, and neither one was to be involved with food preparation or galley cleanup. Jim joked that it was the best excuse for getting out of doing the dishes he’d ever had. Neil also suggested that mouth-to-mouth contact should be avoided. If the disease didn’t appear in a week or ten days, they could assume they were safe and relax some of the stringency of this regime—“Perhaps permit the holding of hands.” If there was no sign of the disease after ten days, they could “have an orgy.” But despite Neil’s efforts to make light of these new regulations, the effect was to make everyone realize that they might be carrying with them the very thing they had gone to sea to escape.
While they were anchored off Anguilla, Neil sent Jim and Sheila ashore to try to locate the nearest doctor. They returned ten hours later with the depressing information that there were no longer any doctors left on the whole island. They had all fled. Starvation was almost universal. Actually there was one old doctor they’d located in a small fishing village, but he was feeble and indicated he couldn’t cope with a bullet wound in the stomach.
Philip had been placed on the dinette settee in the main cabin, where the pitching and rolling of Vagabond was least felt during their topsy-turvy passage through the storm; now he was running a fever. Macklin indicated that an infection had taken hold in the abdomen. He had started Philip on an antibiotic, was giving him codeine for the pain, and was feeding him only liquids. Philip was urinating normally but had not had a bowel movement since he had been shot. There was still no evidence of internal hemorrhaging. Most of the pain was in his back, where the bullet had shattered a rib. Jeanne’s wound showed no signs of infection, and she insisted on being up and about with her left arm in a sling.
Since their proposed southeasterly course toward the eastern tip of Brazil and the mouth of the Amazon would leave them with never more than a day’s sail downwind to land, Sheila advised Neil to go ahead and they would see if Philip improved. They both knew that medical skill on most of the islands was probably limited. The farther south they got, the more likely they’d be to find competent doctors.
Neil made no effort to hide how long and difficult a passage they would have simply to get south to the equator, much less to find a home someplace along the coast of Brazil or on the islands of Ascension or St. Helena if that was their decision. By their third day at sea Oscar and Tony were already complaining. It was a voyage of almost two thousand miles to the equator, largely against the prevailing winds and along an inhospitable coast. If the leaks in Scorpio’s hull couldn’t be patched, they might not be able to continue as a fleet. Although the leaking was reduced from what it had been during the initial stormy passage from the Virgins, it still took five to ten minutes an hour of pumping to clear Scorpio’s bilge. Oscar and Tony maintained that Barbados might make a possible haven, but Neil, happy that the northeasterly wind was letting them head directly southeast toward the equator, refused. Their goal was to cross the equator to escape the fallout and “plague” of the Northern Hemisphere and to get to a country that had not been overwhelmed by the effects of the war. Neil also felt it was important to avoid land until the “plague” had run its course.
But from the beginning there was an atmosphere of heaviness and conflict aboard that was new. The death of Katya, the wounding of Philip and Jeanne, the knowledge that at any moment one or more of them might be stricken with a mortal illness, the awareness that for all the effort and the violence of their raid on the Mollycoddle pirates they were still living on short rations and still depending on the sea for their sustenance—all this created a depression in most of the crew that was deeper than ever before. Yet the effect on Neil was quite different and unexpected.
Something had broken inside him. Some coiled spring that had him tensely concentrating at every moment on the right strategies for survival was no longer there. For him, even though he had acted with all his skill and energy, the worst had happened: a loved one killed, two others wounded. Some part of him gave up. Or rather, some major part of him now accepted his own fallibility, mortality, inability to deal with the forces attacking them. He still commanded, but without the vehemence that had driven him since the wars began. Instead of feeling his usual rage at the forces of destruction when he realized that Lisa might be infected with the plague, he felt strangely tranquil, even gentle. When Tony publicly attacked him for the death of Katya, Neil was not angry at Tony at alclass="underline" he knew that he was at fault and that he was helpless to do otherwise, and he now accepted both. He was helpless: somehow that new awareness liberated him.
Although he and Frank had had no formal reconciliation, Neil found himself feeling his old affection for him and turning most of the decisions about the sailing of Vagabond over to him. On Scorpio Olly was captain, with watch teams led by Tony, Oscar, and Arnie. On Vagabond Frank, Jim, and Sheila were the mates, Jeanne, Lisa, and Macklin crewing as necessary.
Neil no longer made any effort to disguise his feelings for Jeanne. He touched her, caressed her hair, tended to her wound, spoke to her lovingly. He made no effort to make love to her, both because of his concern for Frank and out of fear that he might be a carrier of the disease.
When Neil listened to the shortwave radio now and heard about the horrors others were facing throughout the world, he felt he was part of a larger family. On the second night out from Anguilla in particular he listened to two new ham operators, one in Florida, the other in Texas. At first he thought the anonymous voices had revived his Americanism, reminded him of his American roots and citizenship, but when he thought about it further, he realized that the larger family he felt connected to was that of the survivors.
He felt no connection with the President and his martial law and executive orders and his empty claims of victories. He felt no connection with the heroic pushers of buttons, the pilots of bombers, the submarine captains, the generals generaling from a half-mile down inside the earth somewhere. His people were the survivors, survivors all over the world, American, English, German, Russian, yes, Russian even, fleeing this incredible madness.
And, strangely, Neil found he could read again. From the first day of the holocaust until the evening that they dropped anchor off Anguilla he realized that he had been unable to read fiction or history or philosophy: everything had seemed so trivial or so irrelevant in the face of his quest for survival. Then suddenly that evening he spent two hours reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one of two dozen classic novels he had aboard. The adolescent joys of Natasha and Sonya and young Count Rostov brought tears to his eyes: the joys that Lisa and Katya were missing—had missed. The battle of Austerlitz, although totally remote from their experiences of the previous month, seemed so real, so human, that his own life and the wounds of Philip and Jeanne seemed human, bearable. He knew that the joy he found in Tolstoy represented—paradoxically in the light of Katya’s tragic death—his strangely recovered joy in life, and his acceptance of his powerlessness.
Jeanne seemed to have been affected by Katya’s death, her own wound, and the fact that she had killed a man in a slightly different way. She appeared more pensive and puzzled. Neil could see that she too was less desperate than they both had been for most of the earlier time, but he could also see that as she watched for signs of illness in Lisa, she hadn’t quite decided how she could take another such blow. Neil and Jeanne spent more time talking, not just about the day-to-day details of survival but also about the question of who was to blame for everything that had happened, large and small. Although Jeanne saw that her killing Larry had been an act of self-defense, she argued quietly that if they hadn’t attacked the pirates’ estate, her life might not have had to be defended. When Neil reminded her that the pirates had kidnapped Katya, she hadn’t replied, and Neil felt remorse again: they had retrieved Katya only to sail her to her death.