Lisa left; the surge and sway belowdecks had left her feeling slightly nauseous, and her encounter with Macklin made her uneasy. On her way back to the wheelhouse she noticed a light in Frank’s cabin, and she mentioned to Jim that Macklin was with Seth and that his father seemed to be up.
“Dad’s not sleeping well,” Jim said. “He’s still sick.”
“I know,” said Lisa, taking Jim’s hand in hers. “Do you think… it’s…”
“I hope it’ll go away in a few days,” said Jim. “Neil and Olly don’t seem too bad, and they were exposed almost as much.”
“Mom thinks he’s a little depressed about losing… your mother.”
Jim merely nodded, staring forward into the darkness.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Lisa asked softly.
“Yes, “said Jim.
“My dad’s dead too,” said Lisa. “Sometimes it seems like he never lived… Everything is… so changed.” Lisa released his hand and steadied herself against the control-panel shelf.
“It’s strange,” Jim said, putting his arm around her waist. “Everything I used to be interested in, you know, sports, music, cars, seems sort of far away. I tried listening to some of my favorite tapes and I started to… you know, I felt like crying. It was pretty funny.”
Lisa didn’t reply but gently moved closer. She wanted to put her arm around him, but felt awkward and left her hands on the molding.
“I’m glad you’re here, Lisa,” Jim went on very softly. “I get kinda lonely with my dad… sick and Neil all wrapped up in the boat. You’re about the only part of the old world that seems… all right.”
“I… I’m glad you’re here too,” she said, letting her head rest against his shoulder. “We will be all right, won’t we, Jim?” There was a wistful quality in her voice that Jim felt viscerally.
He hesitated, all the horrors, past and still possible, clamoring for his attention.
“Yes,” he replied simply, pulling her more tightly against him and ignoring the clamor. “But not unless we take down the genoa and reef the main.”
She looked up at him, puzzled.
“The wind’s gotten too strong,” he went on. “I think the number-one watch team better reduce sail.”
She smiled and took over the wheel from Jim, who smiled back and went off to get his safety harness and go forward.
By midmorning of the following day Neil’s midnight romance had become unreal. Reality was upon him in the form of a crowded wheelhouse and thirty-knot winds out of the east southeast. A little after dawn Jeanne had gotten up to prepare the watch of Frank and Tony a breakfast and given Neil a polite, perhaps warm smile, but with no more apparent passion in it than the one she gave to Frank.
After breakfast he and Frank had listened to another appalling news summary. Refugees were flooding southward all over the world and being resented and rebuffed by the local populations in the traditional ways of treating war refugees. Cuba, the Panama Canal, and Venezuelan oilfields and refineries had all been struck by some sort of nuclear weapon; the Caribbean too would be a disaster area. It wasn’t even clear who had attacked Venezuela, since she, like all the rest of South America, had loudly declared her neutrality and was refusing to sell oil to the United States.
And later, at eight A.M., with the wind now beginning to screech through the stainless steel rigging and Tony cracking a rib in a fall while trying to bring in a torn jib, reality had regained its usual harshness. In the crowded wheelhouse, under an overcast and darkening sky, Skippy was whining about the taste of fish, Lisa had just vomited up her breakfast on the wheelhouse floor, and Jeanne, feeling queasy herself, was trying to deal with them. For Neil, battling at the helm, there was no room for romance with a torn jib, an injured crewman, rising winds and seas, and Frank and Tony arguing with him about their course.
By dead reckoning from their noon position of the day before Neil calculated that they were about a hundred miles east southeast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina, a spit of land that tipped the long sand barrier that stretched south of the notorious Cape Hatteras. Without consulting the others, Neil had been maintaining a southerly course, partly because he was considering a run to the Bahamas and the West Indies rather than trying to put in again on the mainland. Frank had complained the previous afternoon that they seemed to be staying unnecessarily far off the coast and suggested they angle more to westward. Now with large angry swells sweeping up against them from the south and the wind still rising, a choice was being forced upon him. They could either continue to work their way south, or they could turn and run back toward land.
They had been unable to pick up a radio station in the Morehead City-Pamlico Sound area of North Carolina, and they had no way of knowing what conditions would be like there.
Reports from the Bahamas about the West Indies were discouraging. The Bahamian government had declared a state of emergency and martial law, warning Bahamians that the food imports on which they had depended for more than eighty percent of their normal supply had been cut off by the war. Foreign ships, by which Neil knew must be meant American ships, were urged to go elsewhere. After panic buying had eliminated most of the island’s stores of food, the Bahamians were not welcoming the sudden influx of sick, injured, and foodless Americans fleeing from the two nuclear explosions over Miami and Cape Canaveral. There had been at least one ugly racial incident already, or so Neil concluded from Radio Nassau’s report that five American “yachtsmen” had been killed by several unapprehended black Bahamians “in a street fight.” If Vagabond had to bypass the Bahamas, they would run desperately short of food and water before they could hope to reach Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. Jim and Lisa’s success the last two mornings at hooking three big fish was encouraging, but they were in the Gulf Stream now; if they continued south, in another day or two they’d be east of it and the fishing less dependable.
As the wind freshened and storm clouds gathered on the southern horizon like thick black smoke, Neil had to admit that he was also worried about Vagabond: she was badly overloaded. A good trimaran normally sails faster than a good monohull because of its light weight, which permits it to skip over the water rather than plow through it.
But Vagabond was now almost two thousand pounds heavier than the ship they had sailed north and was moving two or three knots slower, which made her pound heavily into the huge seas that were rolling at her.
Although altering course to run before the storm would put an end to this slamming, which was the greatest source of anxiety for Neil and discomfort for the crew, Neil knew that even then the buffeting of the wind and seas would continue to drain the energy from everyone aboard. In his own experience thirty-five-knot winds and twelve-foot seas were bearable, but for most of the others they represented a danger far more immediate, palpable, and unpleasant than anything on the mainland. Everyone was seasick except Neil, Tony, and Elaine, and since none of them were the type to go cleaning up other people’s messes, most of the cabins were beginning to stink of vomit. With Seth’s bullet wounds, Tony’s cracked rib, and general seasickness, their crew was considerably weakened.
But despite the problems he hated the thought of turning back toward the fallout and explosions and people-evil of the land. A storm at sea was something he could deal with; the effects of man’s madness on land were not.
As he made the rounds of the ship before meeting with Frank, Tony, and Macklin to discuss their course, he knew that to continue southward against these seas would create serious morale problems. It might be exhilarating to escape from explosions, pirates, and radioactive fallout, but with those dangers now distant and remote, the endless slamming, the awful whine of the wind in the rigging, the woeful roll, pitch, and plunge of the trimaran, the seasickness, and worst of all, he knew, no indication of any safer haven to the south than to the west was depressing most of the ship’s company. Only Elaine and Tony had complained directly, but the averted gaze of Jeanne and the sardonic humor of Frank and Seth revealed similar feelings.