“No, not that,” Neil replied. “The thing that’s always bothered me is that the Russians attacked American cities and industries and military bases. We’re told they attacked missile sites, too, but one station way back at the beginning said something that I’ve never forgotten: they suggested that people flee to North and South Dakota to escape the fallout.”
Jeanne watched him as he paused, holding his gaze and waiting.
“I can’t help concluding that if the Russians didn’t hit South Dakota, it was because they knew there was nothing there to hit: all our missiles had already been fired.”
“If the Russians had struck first,” Jeanne prompted, “South Dakota would have been a primary target.”
“Yes.”
“So you think that the President gave the orders for a surprise attack?” she asked quietly.
“He wanted his nation to survive,” Neil replied. “He thought it was sit and get clobbered or strike first. He ordered the first strike for the same reasons that a Russian premier would have done it: out of fear that the enemy was desperate enough to do it, so he’d better do it first.”
Jeanne felt a distant sadness. She hadn’t really questioned the assumption of all the American radio stations that the Russians had struck first. She realized that she felt it was only natural that they would do it; Americans had been fearing they would attack for years. Yet she understood that that very fear, so pervasive, so hopeless, might have led an American government to do what Neil was speculating it had done. She felt no anger, only the distant sadness.
“The missiles fired at South Dakota targets might have been intercepted,” she suggested, “or might have missed on the first strike. And then after our Dakota-based missiles had been fired, the Russians left the area alone.” Even as she spoke, most of her mind was accepting Neil’s thesis.
“Yes, that’s possible,” agreed Neil. “I’d thought of that. But we know that the very first Soviet missiles hit American cities, targets that would always be vulnerable, whereas missile silos are worth hitting only on the very first strike, before they’ve launched their missiles.”
Jeanne looked at him.
“How does it make you feel?” she asked.
“It doesn’t make me feel much one way or another,” he replied. “It doesn’t change how hungry I am.” He smiled. “The two sides had gotten each other into a position where, sooner or later, someone was going to hit first. The fact that our government may have been the first to give in to that fear doesn’t really horrify me. The mistakes had already been made.”
Jeanne stared out the cabin window at the almost horizontal line of snowflakes rushing past.
“No wonder we’re outcasts.”
And later that same afternoon their talk brought them to a subject that gave them new vitality. When Neil, still huddled under the covers with Jeanne, had first discussed Lisa’s continuing weakness, he had expressed concern that Lisa might be pregnant, which, because the fetus’s development might have been impaired by her high fever, would put an added strain on her health. Jeanne had responded that Lisa had had a regular period a few days before the plague struck her, and then, looking puzzled, suddenly looked with a flush of joy at Neil.
“What are you thinking?” Neil asked, aware of something special happening with her.
“I just realized that… that I may be pregnant,” she said to him, looking half-joyful and half-awed.
Neil felt stunned. Their lovemaking had usually had an end-of-the-world desperation that was outside normal, everyday reality. Pregnancy belonged to the old world, not the ugly, tenuous one they now inhabited.
“My period’s overdue,” Jeanne went on, now looking uncertain. “I suppose it might just be… my wound… my worrying… diet…” She frowned as she considered these other explanations. But then she smiled again: she and Neil had made love without contraception during her most fertile time. In those days the possible consequences seemed irrelevant. Now they seemed divine. Even the shadow of the possible effects of her exposure to radiation didn’t dim her joy.
“Lovemaking does tend to create babies, I suppose,” Neil said to her, still somewhat dazed but with a grin on his face.
“Oh, Neil, I hope so, I hope so, I hope so,” Jeanne said, hugging him.
Bright-eyed, he looked down at her and then off through the window at the snow swirling past. He had a boyishly happy, faraway expression.
“Now, we’ll have to live,” he said dreamily. “Just to see if it’s a boy or a girl.”
But an hour later, as he struggled up on deck for the first time in a week, he knew that his puny aspirations would have nothing to do with it. Their lives—even the new one growing within Jeanne—still hung by a thread.
When the gale lessened and the wind shifted they sailed on through the Straits. They were sailing mechanically now, without real hope that they would ever see the Pacific, but sailing because all other alternatives were worse. They made barely a hundred miles over the first three days, sailing only during the eight hours of daylight, anchoring at night. Neil at least was able to stand watch again.
The absence of any sign of life during their first days in the Straits made them suspect that there couldn’t be a small bustling city only a little way off. As they neared the place in the Straits where their map showed Punta Arenas to be and they still had seen no boats, no smoke, no planes, they decided that there couldn’t be much of a military presence and thus humans in Punta Arenas might not be a threat, might, in fact, be helpful and sympathetic. So they proceeded to try it by day.
Uncertain of their exact location, they had almost sailed past the town when Philip spotted it through the binoculars three miles to the north—the charred wreckage of buildings and a few small houses on the hillsides. Nervously they altered course to sail over. Although the temperatures were in the forties the scene that drew toward them was bleak. All the buildings on the waterfront were blackened shells or had burned to the ground. The hulks of a large freighter and several smaller ships lay half-sunk along the waterfront. As they anchored off a burned-out wharf a few stray dogs scurried like overgrown rats among the blackened timbers of the wreckage. The hills above the town were brown and gray with only occasional patches of white from the recent snow. Nowhere was there any sign of human life. So fearful of man had those aboard Vagabond become that the emptiness of the city was as much a relief as a source of sadness. Neil, who had joined the others on deck, felt the same sense of being an alien on another planet that he had felt at each of their last landfalls.
They had lowered their dinghy into the water, and Jim, Neil, and Sheila were preparing to go ashore when two, three, and then half a dozen people appeared along one small section of unburned bulkhead fifty feet away. There were four men, a woman, and a child. Two of the men were carrying rifles. All were dressed in woolen ponchos and several wore the distinctive bowler hats of the Andes. The Chileans stared at the trimaran and its occupants, who stared back. Then one of the men with a rifle shouted something. Jeanne, frowning, shouted back in Spanish a request that he say it again. The man shouted the same thing a second time. Jeanne frowned a moment and consulted with Sheila.
“What’s he saying?” Neil asked.
“As near as we can tell,” said Jeanne with a puzzled smile on her face, “he’s saying—roughly translated—‘Hi, where the hell did you get that weird boat?’”
In the next two days, after making friends with the few Chileans who were still living in Punta Arenas, they gradually learned that the city had been destroyed in a brief war between Chile and Argentina ten weeks earlier. No one was certain why the war had started, although the two countries had long disputed over parts of Tierra del Fuego. It wasn’t even certain who had won the war, but Argentinian jets had destroyed the city and sunk most of the Chilean ships during the four days of fighting. With the city mostly destroyed, the Chilean government had ordered it evacuated, perhaps because they were obliged to under the peace treaty, perhaps because they were unwilling to spend money supplying it with food and fuel during the winter. Thousands of people had sailed off in freighters and navy ships for Santiago, leaving less than a hundred people who either chose to stay or got left behind out of ignorance. There was no phone, radio, road, or air contact between this part of Chile and the more civilized parts farther north. A single Chilean navy ship had turned up a month ago, looked around, and disappeared.