Although nuclear explosions had destroyed the Panama Canal, Miami, Cape Canaveral, American forces in Central America, and the oil refineries in Venezuela, the Caribbean area had been spared since the third day of the war. Some rich Americans were flying to Puerto Rico and this influx of the privileged was deeply resented. Despite the presence of the U.S. Navy, which, with the losses of its other Caribbean bases now had its largest facility outside San Juan, pirate attacks were reported against both private and commercial ships, both small and large. Food riots occurred on a regular basis in San Juan and smaller cities although officially there was as yet no famine.
It was to this island that Vagabond was supposedly heading, but in the new world that they all had experienced over the last ten days, no one aboard really expected anything. Neil set a course, they sailed on. In this new world the future was something that could only hurt or terrify or kill. To look beyond the next wave was dangerous. Neil set a course, they sailed on. To hope for more could only be done in whispers.
On their third night at sea Lisa and Jim had the ten-to-two watch, with Neil awake in the wheelhouse. Near midnight Jeanne fixed them some hot tea, one bag for three cups. Vagabond was still sailing due south with a good easterly breeze. An afternoon squall line seemed well behind them. With Jim now at the helm and Lisa watching the trolling rig in the side cockpit, Neil and Jeanne sat kittycorner across from each other a few feet apart in the unlit wheelhouse, sipping at their weak tea.
“Do you think about where we’re going to end up?” Jeanne asked him unexpectedly.
Neil did think about it, frequently. It made for depressing thinking.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Will we be able to settle in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands?” Jeanne asked after she saw that he wasn’t going to go on.
“Perhaps,” Neil replied, doubting it very much. As he looked at her he wished he could share his fears, but he wanted even more to spare her the burden. Even though the sky was mostly overcast, the nearly full moon shed light on Vagabond’s decks and allowed Neil to see the outline of Jeanne’s face and body. She was very still, her teacup held in her lap. The afternoon squalls had dampened the seas, and for a change, Vagabond wasn’t pounding but rolling gently through the water.
“I suppose, ultimately, it has to be South America, doesn’t it?” she went on. “Some place untouched, where the… infrastructure of civilization is still solid.”
Neil sipped at his tea. He’d heard a report that half a dozen South American countries had set up internment camps for American refugees. The threat of the mysterious plaguelike disease that was spreading from the western U.S. was increasing their fear and resentment of Americans.
“Yes, I guess it will,” he said, without elaborating.
“That was a strange time we had that other night, wasn’t it?” she asked unexpectedly in her low, intense voice. Neil suddenly realized that Jim, at the helm, eight feet away, and Lisa were both within earshot. “That other night” in the side cockpit had been… my God, almost a week before.
“It was more than that,” Neil answered.
For a half-minute, as Neil stared at Jeanne’s indistinct face, neither of them spoke.
“There aren’t any rules anymore, are there?” she said after a while. “We have to create our own.”
“There are rules,” Neil said. “Blowing up the world didn’t get rid of them.”
“I mean… some of the old ones can’t be applied anymore.”
Like what? Neil wondered. Like widows and a period of mourning? Love leading to marriage? Love leading to bed?
“Like what?” he asked. He noticed Lisa coming in from the port cockpit to talk to Jim.
“The old rule that you could go to bed with a man for enjoyment,” Jeanne said in a low voice.
Startled, he waited for her to go on. It wasn’t an old rule he had expected her to come up with.
“In the new world,” she continued softly, glancing toward the wheel, where Jim and Lisa were also talking in low voices. “In our new world, in this small world of Vagabond, that rule won’t work. My sleeping with… a man would transform our universe.”
“Yes, it would,” Neil said.
“Frank wants me to sleep with him,” she announced,
“I see,” he said in a voice so low he wasn’t sure she could hear it. Then, louder: “Rather popular, aren’t you?”
For a moment the only sound was of the water rushing past Vagabond’s three hulls. In the darkness Jeanne was only a vague silhouette.
“…Neil…”
The sound of anguish in her soft voice made Neil move to the edge of his seat, and leaning toward her he started to speak, but knew that even whispers would be heard by Jim and Lisa. He slowly lifted his right hand in the darkness to touch her unseen face. When it reached her cheek, she held it against her face with both hands, turning to kiss his palm.
“I see,” Neil said in a normal voice.
“I hope you see,” she answered in a low voice, but still loud enough that Jim and Lisa could hear.
“What I see,” said Neil slowly, caressing her face with his hand, and fully aware of the absurdity of the conversation, “is that you are still temporarily insane. Am I correct?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“And you see that I am still temporarily insane. Correct?”
“Yes. I hope so. Yes.”
“And now you’re telling me,” he went on in a low voice, barely able to contain his joy and laughter, “that Frank has become temporarily insane too. Is that right?”
“Yes.” She giggled softly.
“How about Jim? Is he insane?”
She laughed again.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well, I think so,” said Jim suddenly from the wheel. “I can’t tell what you two are talking about. You sound nuts. ”
“Mother, you are being silly,” Lisa added with a childlike primness that Jeanne thought she’d lost since the war began.
As Neil and Jeanne stopped laughing Neil could feel Jeanne tense, her hands still gripping his.
“Oh, Lisa,” she said, “you missed it all. We’re joking about the insanity of trying to create a new world in South America, but that’s where all of us—Frank, too—think we have to end up.”
“Not me,” said Jim. “I think we should head for the South Pacific.”
“See,” said Neil, grinning in the darkness. “You were right, Jeanne. Jim at least is still sane.”
“Thank God,” said Jeanne.
“Right,” said Neil.
“Around Cape Horn,” said Jim, and Neil and Jeanne’s laughter burst into the wheelhouse again, Jim and Lisa turning to stare at them in slight bewilderment.
“Christ, how do you expect me to sleep?” Frank’s voice cut into Neil’s giddy world like an executioner’s sword.
Pulling away from Jeanne, he turned to see Frank’s gaunt body outlined in the entrance way behind him.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” Neil said quickly. “We got a little silly, I guess.”
“You sure as hell did,” Frank said, still looming in the entrance ten feet away. “You sounded like a couple of loonies out here.”