I contemplated making no hostile move that morning. I needed more rest, and I still had time to reach David. If it was necessary, I planned to spend all day trying to raise him on the radio, but instead, in the morning’s early gray light, and just as the first workers went into the fields, everything changed.
For, just after dawn, the most astonishing mournful and trembling sound echoed across the sky like a great shuddering lament. My first prosaic thought was that a lovesick bull sea lion had bellowed his frustration to the new day, but then I realized that this sound was too great for any animal. It was a foghorn.
Minutes later, like the arrival of some phantasmagorical spacecraft from another world, a ship appeared. She was a real, civilized, proper merchant ship. I took out my half binocular to see the name San Rafael painted on her bows. She looked huge, though in truth she was nothing more than a small coaster, perhaps two hundred feet long and five hundred tons in displacement, but in that bay, where I had thought to see nothing bigger than Stormchild, the San Rafael loomed like a Leviathan. She was a smart ship, beautifully painted in a dark blue and gray livery, with the colorful Chilean ensign painted on her funnel. I guessed from the derricks on her foredeck that she was a supply vessel for the oil and gas rigs that edged the Land of Fire, and she looked just the kind of sturdy efficient vessel that such a job would need. She had a high bluff bow, a cargo deck amidships, and a galleried layer of living quarters behind the bridge at her stern. A wisp of steam from her turbines drifted across the water as the radar aerial on her short mast whipped busily around. Bilge water spewed from a vent on her starboard side, above which men in blue donkey jackets leaned on her varnished rails to gaze at the isolated settlement.
The arrival of the San Rafael had thrown the Genesis community into turmoil. The few gray-dressed women who had already started work in the gardens fled in panic toward the house, while a man in green stared in apparent shock at the cargo boat that now seemed to fill the bay. I shared the man’s evident astonishment, for the ship was a stunning reminder that there was a real world somewhere out beyond the tide-scoured channels, a world where people lived by rules and read newspapers and watched television and drove cars and did their shopping. I stared at the wondrous ship, wondering whether I should try to contact her by radio and ask her to pass a message on to Stormchild, but even as I was trying to compose a suitable explanation for such an odd request, I saw that the San Rafael’s crew was lowering a ship’s boat.
I trained my makeshift glass on the coaster. The lens skidded across the group of men at the ship’s side, down the flank of the coaster, and at last steadied on the small ship’s tender that proved to be a motorized launch about seventeen feet long. The launch’s coxswain, a cigarette dangling from his lip, threw off the falls fore and aft, then accelerated the small boat away from the San Rafael’s hull toward the beach.
The launch was not bringing supplies to the settlement; she carried neither crates nor fuel drums, but instead she was evidently disembarking two passengers. Those passengers, swathed in yellow rain slickers, huddled nervously together on the boat’s central thwart. I could see nothing of the passenger sitting on the port side of the launch, but there was no mistaking the face of the person to starboard, and, upon seeing that face, my heart leapt from its suicidal self-pity into a sudden and very unexpected joy. The face was so very solemn, but it was also so very full of life and enthusiasm and happiness.
Jackie Potten had come to Chile to fetch her Pulitzer.
I switched on my small radio. If I was to talk to the San Rafael I would have to call her on channel 16, which was the only frequency I would expect them to monitor, but someone else had already sequestered that channel. I heard a man’s voice haranguing the San Rafael in quick, agitated Spanish. I could distinguish the ship’s name in the man’s excited torrent of words, but nothing else, though I hardly needed to know Spanish to understand what was being said; the man was attempting to persuade the San Rafael to take the visitors away, but even as his protests became frantic the small launch kept determinedly on toward the beach. As it neared the shore I saw Jackie stand precariously to take a photograph of the settlement.
Two green-dressed men had run to the bluff above the beach and now waved vigorously at the launch in an evident attempt to make it turn round. A third man, this one carrying an automatic rifle, appeared at the back door of the house and began running toward the hills where I lay sheltered, and I realized that the arrival of Jackie and her companion had prompted the same precautions that had attended my own arrival at the settlement. Most of the group stayed protected in the house while a cordon of men tried to make the unwelcome visitors leave. I presumed the gunman on the hill was the precaution of last resort, while the gunman in the house’s upper window was posted to dissuade any of the gray-dressed community members from trying to escape.
The green-dressed man began to climb the lower slopes of the hill. I saw that if he kept on his present course he would take up a firing position just twenty or thirty yards away from me. The man wore a yellow headband and had a bushy black beard, and I guessed he was the same man who had tried to kill me from the cliff’s top at the limestone working. He was panting as he climbed the steep slope. I had forgotten to switch off my radio, and suddenly the small set squawked and I frantically turned down its volume, but the bearded man, who was probably being deafened by his own hoarse breathing, had not heard the sudden burst of noise. I put my ear close to the speaker to hear a new voice transmitting. I suspected the new speaker was Lisl, for she spoke in German. “Genesis One, Genesis One,” she called, “this is the settlement, over.”
The catamaran replied after a few seconds. The reception was very faint, indeed almost inaudible, but I was fairly certain that it was von Rellsteb himself who acknowledged the settlement’s transmission.
“We have more visitors,” Lisl said laconically, and still speaking in German, “two women.”
“Then see them off!” I thought I detected a hint of panic or anger in the guttural voice. Von Rellsteb had gone to sea to intercept what he supposed was Stormchild’s dash for help, but now he was discovering that more unwelcome outsiders had descended on his community.
“The San Rafael brought them,” Lisl went doggedly on, and my German was not good enough to fully understand all her next words, but I thought she said that the coaster’s captain had informed the settlement that the two women had insisted on staying until the ship returned to collect them.
“They mustn’t stay!” Von Rellsteb’s voice betrayed a terrible anxiety.
“Have you found the English boat?” Lisl asked.
“No.”
“Good luck,” Lisl said tonelessly. There was no response and, in the silence, I wondered if I should risk talking to the San Rafael. I decided against trying, for almost certainly the settlement was monitoring channel 16 and any transmission would betray my presence. So, regretfully, I switched my radio off.