Luke Rhinehart: Long Voyage Back

“Well, we’ll come,” said the oldest Dutchman. “We’ll come with much thanks.”

The Romanians were even more dumbfounded. Jim could sense that they suspected some kind of trap. They had greeted him with their rifles at port arms. They whispered together in Romanian, glancing at him nervously.

“Why you do this?” the Romanian captain asked after he had finally understood Jim’s invitation. “You have much food?”

“No,” said Jim. “But… we want… we decided… to share what we have…”

“You want us share our food too, no?”

Jim frowned. “We want to share our food with you,” he finally said. “It seems… right to us. That’s all.”

“We bring our guns?”

“I guess so,” Jim replied. “We don’t have any guns.”

“Ah… no guns…”

“We’d… be honored if you’d come eat with us,” Jim repeated.

“Honored, yes,” echoed the Romanian, looking puzzled. “Well, maybe we come. We see.”

“Two o’clock,” said Jim.

“Two o’clock, yes. Well… And meat, you say? Well… And honor… yes… Maybe we come.”

And so at two o’clock the next afternoon the five Dutch and seven Romanians and twelve Chileans came. The Dutch and Romanians approached as warily as if they were threading their way through a minefield. The Chileans, having already accepted the weirdness of their latest visitors, came fearlessly. The Dutch brought their last flask of wine and a specially baked loaf of bread—their first in a week. The Romanians brought a tiny tin—their last—of caviar, and a freshly caught and baked fish. The Chileans brought a basket of corn and some of their homemade wine. No one brought guns.

And they ate. And though each was limited to a small cup of wine, a single cob of corn, and a few bites of tough stringy dogmeat, they ate happily. And slowly, very slowly, it began to dawn on each of Vagabond’s crew members that they might live. For Neil it was the friendliness of the Chileans and the Dutch and the Romanians, expressed primarily in exaggerated gestures of delight at the feast and continual smiles, that made him realize that some deep part of him had begun to feel that he would be running and on the edge of death forever. Now the act of sharing the treasured bit of wine with Jacob and his friends, and a pipeful of tobacco with one of the Romanians, altered his view of things entirely. The running, at long last, was over. The Romanians and Dutch had decided, as they had, to remain in the Straits at least through the summer. Although everyone left in the destroyed city was on starvation rations— Vagabond was now in fact totally out of food—fishing in the Straits was good, there were small animals to be hunted, and spring was now only a few weeks away.

To the north the wars they had fled were presumably continuing. Here, at the bottom of the world, a few survivors had gathered. They still were struggling to survive, but now with each other rather than against. It was a small first step on the long voyage back.

It was Olly who summed up the new feeling. He came up to Neil and Jeanne after an hour of feasting and mingling and unfolding his monologues with the two dozen strangers, few of whom understood him. There were tears in his eyes.

“I been feeling funny,” he said to them, “and I think I finally figured out what it is…” He looked up at them, a laughing skeleton. “I may have to get used to living again…”

This is a work of fiction. The actual effects of a large-scale nuclear war would be so much worse than I have described that no bearable work of fiction could be written about them.

Published by Delacorte Press

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New York, N.Y. 10017

Copyright © 1983 by George Cockcroft

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ISBN 0-440-04617-3