Tired as she was, Madelaine found she was glad to be cooking again. Sven gutted the fish and cut it up for her, and she found fat in a cupboard. Since the food in the freezer, as their host had said, was on the edge of spoiling, she saw no reason to be economical with it. They sat down to a meal of fried salmon, six vegetables, and biscuits baked, scone fashion, on top of the wood stove.
“Maddy,” Sven said after they had eaten enough to take the first sharp edge off their hunger, “Mr. Fletcher was telling me he saw the flood sweep over New York.”
“Yes,” said the old man. He was growing more expansive. “I saw it on television. The waves were fifty feet high, coming up from the harbor, and they were full of bodies and pieces of wrecks. Nobody on the East Coast believed the warning, you see, and so nobody got out ahead of time.”
“There was a warning?” Sven asked.
“Yes, so I heard. The Secretary of Welfare went on the air and told everybody to get out of lowlying areas. But in the middle of a sentence he was cut off, and the announcer said a mistake had been made. It would have been better if people had believed him. I’ve heard that two-thirds of the people who lived in New York City are believed to be dead.”
“I don’t understand why so many died,” Sven said thoughtfully. “Even if the water was fifty feet deep in the streets, weren’t people safe in the upper stories of buildings? For a while, I mean.”
“I guess they would have been. But all the power was off, and none of the elevators was working. People clustered just above the water, on cornices and looking out of windows. When the earthquake came-“
“Earthquake?” Madelaine said. “In New York?”
“Yes. There’ve been earthquakes all over the world, not to mention cyclones and hurricanes. But as I was saying, when the earthquake came, the tall buildings shook like—like straws. Like the tines on a tuning fork. People began to fall out of the buildings. I saw them falling like ‘cots off the trees in a high wind. Then the picture went off. Now the only news I can get is fifteen minutes a day, just at noon, over my battery-powered radio.
“New York City is still under fifty feet of water. I guess it always will be. Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, is in eruption, and the whole state of Florida is submerged. So is a lot of Texas, and all the California coast. It’s like the end of the world.”
“It’s the end of something, certainly,” Sven said. “What about foreign countries? The United States wasn’t the only one to suffer, was it?”
“No, of course not. Well, they said the Netherlands was completely under—worse than Florida—and all the south part of England up to Scotland. Denmark is flooded, and parts of Germany and France—parts of Italy—Scandinavia—I don’t know what a ll. Southern India—the Chinese coast—most of Japan. They’ve had hurricanes everywhere, and terrible windstorms as well as the flood.
“It’s the biggest disaster in human history. It’s so big it’s paralyzed people. The survivors don’t know where to begin. There’s no power, no gasoline, no safe water. There isn’t even any way to bury the dead.”
“What caused the floods in the first place, do you know?” Sven asked.
“They said the ice at the North Pole melted, almost overnight. But what caused that—my own idea is that a bunch of H-bombs got lost, maybe on one of these atomic subs under the ice, and started melting it. No country would admit to having caused all this.”
“No, I suppose not,” Sven said. He looked at Madelaine, who, fed and warm for the first time in days, was dozing in her chair. “Come on, Maddy,” he said, starting to rise. “We’ll wash the dishes. And then we’ll be on our way, as Mr. Fletcher says.”
Drowsy but obedient, Madelaine struggled to get to her feet. Fletcher frowned. “Wait,” he said, though not very graciously. “You and your girl can stay here tonight. She can have my bed, and you can sleep on the floor. I’ll sleep in my chair. But you must leave tomorrow. I insist on it.”
Sven nodded. He. half-carried Madelaine into the tiny bedroom, and covered her up in the bed. Then he lay down on the floor with a blanket, near the stove, and was immediately asleep.
Once or twice during the night his eyes were jerked open by the raw brilliance of lightning; the flashes were very close, and the deafening roar of thunder was only a second behind the flash. But even a thunderstorm could not keep him awake for long. With his arm over his eyes, he plunged back into sleep.
Toward morning the storm retreated. Sven thought that once Fletcher rose from his chair and went to look out of the window. Then it was really daylight. The smell of coffee was in the air. Sven yawned and sat up. “Good morning,” he said to the old man.
“Good morning. I’ve made coffee. Your girl’s still asleep. There was a plane wreck during the night. Come and see.”
He led Sven over to the window and pointed. Seemingly four or five miles off, a column of heavy black smoke was still rising in the air. “I think it must have been caught in the storm,” Fletcher said. “I heard it going over, and went to the window to look. It was already on fire, burning all over, when it hit the ground.”
Sven nodded. There was obviously nothing to be done for the people in the plane, and hadn’t been before Fletcher had seen it crash.
Madelaine came out of the bedroom. She said, “Good morning,” washed her face at the sink, and then baked more biscuits on top of the stove.
“Good-bye, sir,” Sven said when they had eaten and washed the dishes. “Which way is it to the refugee camp?”
“It’s about fifteen miles from here, at a town called O’Brien. If you cut across the hills, toward the plane wreck, you can save yourself a good deal of walking. You should pick up the road about a quarter of a mile beyond the plane. Go northeast.”
He went with them to the door of the cabin. “Some of the biscuits your girl cooked,” he said, handing them a parcel. “And I put in a box of matches, in a plastic bag. You might want to make a fire.”
“Thank you,” Sven said. And then, on impulse, “Wouldn’t you like to come with us? If there’s another flood—”
The old man laughed. “I’ll take the chance. It would have to be considerably worse than the first one to bother me on such high ground. No, I’ll stay here.”
This was true, and Sven did not press him. “Good-bye, sir.”
“Good-bye. Good luck.”
As they walked along over the hills, orienting themselves by the smoke of the wrecked plane, Madelaine said, “Sven, do you notice a certain lack of—of buoyancy?”
“I’m still tired, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “A night of sleeping on the floor isn’t very restful.”
“No, I don’t mean that. But when we were with the dolphins, I felt—more than myself. Lighter. There was a sort of inner buoyancy.”
“Um. Yes, I think I know what you mean. I miss them surprisingly. I feel as if I’d lost part of myself.”
“Yes. And then, while we were with them, anything could happen. We moved in a world of wonders. We talked to dolphins, trigger ed earthquakes, and communicated with distant stars. Now we’re back in the ordinary world, the world where, if remarkable things happen, they are usually unfortunate.”
Sven laughed. “But Maddy, I’ve been thinking, we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. The radioactivity of the world’s oceans is greatly diluted, and the sea people ought to be safe for, oh, the next fifty years. It ought to take that long, at least, for people to get back to where they were before the floods. They’ll be too busy for a long time to bother the dolphins, and if they become dangerous again, the sea people can use Udra in the new way to defend themselves.”
“The only danger now would be if somebody connected the dolphins with the melting of the ice,” Madelaine said thoughtfully. “If Splits get the idea the dolphins are responsible, they’ll start to hunt them down as soon as the worst part of the floods is over.”