Luke Rhinehart - Long Voyage Back

This is not a ship’s log nor an official report. Although notes we have all taken over the last year have certainly helped, it’s also not our collective diaries and journals. What we’ve tried to do, for ourselves primarily, for some future readers if there are any, is to recreate what it was like for those we knew and for us, for this small family of people who are still survivors.

We make no effort to take a global view, nor have we any pretensions to being historians. We have no thesis. We are interested in people, in those who survived the initial holocaust, whom we met, knew, tried to save, in some cases failed to save; how all of us, the remnants, coped with the aftermath; how we were dragged down by it, so often failing.

Yet some of us survive. At this point that alone gives our story significance.

The room was crowded. Many of its occupants were scurrying from place to place in organized chaos. A gigantic video screen filled the north wall, showing a map of the earth with lighted and blinking symbols indicating the deployment of weapons, forces, counterforces. A second, smaller screen high on the east wall spewed forth printed messages with an inventory of warheads, explosive power, probable targets, and predicted casualties. Along the south wall were ten desk-size computers, each with a uniformed man watching it, just as ancient priests watched moiling entrails. Along the western wall was a long table at which thirteen men were sitting, all but one of them in uniform, listening to a man at the head of the table who was speaking to them in a sullen, lugubrious tone of the intentions of the enemy, .the probability of surviving various war scenarios.

There was no joy or humor in the room. The seriousness had a disjointed, alienated quality, as of men working hard at a job they didn’t quite understand, discussing alternatives they didn’t quite believe in. The sullenness that marked many of their faces was the expression of men who were doing the job expected of them, but found themselves doing things they hadn’t expected to be doing. Their voices were sometimes high-pitched, close to cracking. The eyes of a few of them seemed wild. When one general burst out passionately in favor of one course of action, a few looked at him as if he were mad; others looked at him gloomily, nodding. When an admiral spoke for the opposite course of action, a few looked at him as if he were mad; others looked at him gloomily, shaking their heads.

The words spoken, whether coolly or in anger, sadness, or nervous panic, all had about them a scientific detachment as consistent and codified as the uniforms most of them wore. They were eminently reasonable words, and they poured out across the table with the sporadic urgency of a teletype machine rolling out its messages: nullify evasive evacuation… no more than eighty million… reduce counterstrike potential by forty-two percent… state of belligerency inherent in… dilute the economic infrastructure… diversification of missile response… the reduced military options necessitated by the higher kill ratio… the incidental effects of maximizing radiation… nullifying recuperative capacity…

Behind the ten desks the ten uniformed men stared at the ten computers. On the north wall the giant screen blinked out its kaleidoscope of pulsating lights like a pinball machine; a few uniformed men stared up at it as if waiting for it to tally the final score.

Eventually the men at the table seemed to have reached some sort of decision. A telephone was brought to one of them. With the receiver at his ear he waited patiently for the connection. The others watched, some smoking, others staring at the table. No one spoke. No one bothered to look at either of the video screens. No one smiled.

The man with the phone began speaking respectfully into the receiver, paused, listened, then spoke again. After less than two minutes he hung up. The others looked at him. Two orderlies began placing cups and saucers in front of the officers and poured out a hot, steaming liquid. He cleared his throat and uttered a simple declarative sentence indicating that the man he had spoken to had decided to adopt the course of action they had just recommended. No one spoke. No one leapt into action. No one smiled. One man sipped at the hot, steaming liquid; then another man followed suit. At the end of the table opposite the presiding officer a man began to cry. The officer opposite glared angrily; two other men looked away, tight-lipped.

The presiding officer began to speak again in a tense, gloomy voice, addressing first one man and then another down the table. One by one they rose to depart. Most hurried. No one spoke. No one smiled.

Finally there were only two of them left at the table—the presiding officer and the man who was crying. The first, sullen and gloomy, rose and left. Only one man was left.

Her three white hulls slicing quietly through the water, her giant genoa bellying out to starboard, Vagabond sailed into the bay. Neil Loken sat in the port cockpit of the large trimaran, watching the causeway of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, through which they had just passed, recede behind them. At the wheel Jim Stoor was peering ahead and shifting his weight excitedly from one foot to the other. Although his father owned Vagabond, this was the first time Jim had made landfall after a long ocean passage, and his boyish face, haloed by the rays of the early morning sun, showed it. He looked to Neil at that moment—his slender, broad-shouldered body bronzed by their five days at sea—like a seagoing Pan.

But Neil didn’t share Jim’s excitement and joy. Sailing up into the wide mouth and throat of the bay depressed him. He was an ocean sailor, and he rarely enjoyed leaving the clear, deep waters of the open sea for the mud and shallows of inshore bays and inlets.

And it didn’t help that the Chesapeake was a sort of home. He’d attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis for four years and, after serving in Vietnam for three, captained a forty-six-foot sloop based in Norfolk for several summers. Sailing down the bay out to sea had often meant adventure, freedom, escape. Sailing into it meant land, civilization, the complications of returning home.

As he looked forward to examine the set of the mainsail and genoa and to check Jim’s course toward the next buoy, he was also troubled by the quite mundane fact that Vagabond’s propeller shaft had been struck and bent by a submerged log off Cape Hatteras, which had left the big trimaran with no auxiliary power. How long it would take to sail her the next seventy-five miles up to Point Lookout to pick up Frank Stoor and his guests would depend on the wind, a notoriously unreliable friend, especially in the Chesapeake.

“Hey, look!” Jim suddenly said, pointing past Neil toward Norfolk. “Warships. Three of them.”

Turning, Neil sighted along the horizon and saw three long, gray vessels moving out of Hampton Roads, heading out the southern channel toward the bridge and the ocean. Two were destroyers, the third a ship the Navy must have designed since he’d resigned his commission. A supply ship maybe—but since when was a supply ship accompanied by two destroyers?