Complete Short Fiction, page 10
“God in Heaven, Walter!” shouted Joe Remsen. “You all did get back!”
Walter Chase, his huge hands still shaking continuously in the thin, cold morning, looked smiling up at his old friend. “Joe, that’s just the handsomest one-hoss outfit on the island,” he said simply.
“Walter, they say she came apart less than an hour after you got them off! I saw her masts go down at noon yesterday from the tower!”
Walter Chase stretched suddenly and stared, quite piercingly, back at Joe Remsen. “Well,” he said, “we didn’t need her after the crew got off, did we, Joe?”
At the time his old friend thought Walter Chase was joking, and he laughed out loud. But thinking back on that moment in later years, he realized that Walter Chase had meant what he said. The Kirkham had been allowed to collapse because she somehow wasn’t needed any more. Yet he never asked about it again but only wondered.
Joe Remsen climbed down from the buggy and shook his head. “We figured you were goners. That damn tug went as far as Great Point and then turned back last night. Too blamed rough, they said, the rotten cowards! By God, Walter, there won’t never be another rescue like this one! You better believe that! They’re going to build that canal one of these days. Them gasoline engines’ll get better and they’ll put them in the surfboats. God Almighty, you took seven of them off. Not one lost. Twenty-six hours out in that smother! It’s a miracle! Why, man, you moved heaven and earth . . . ”
The hot coffee drained its warmth through Walter Chase and suddenly he felt drowsy. “Joe, we never did try a drail for squeteague out there. Just too blamed busy the whole time. . . .”
And the two old friends grinned and chuckled at each other in the winter sunlight on a ’Sconset street.
The Battle of the Abaco Reefs
This is the third in Hilbert Schenck’s fine series of sf stories with a sea-going background in common (“Three Days at the End of the World”, September 1977; “The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck”, September 1978). The story concerns, among many other things, the invasion of the Bahamian island of Abaco by an energy-starved United States, and it is the longest, richest and most exciting to date.
The fall wind blew steadily from the east, dead across Elbow Cay, and the big, vertical-axis wind machines, running synchronously in the steady breeze, gentled the island with their hushahushahusha, a giant snoozing in the lowest frequencies. Susan Peabody toyed with her coffee and half watched the tiny, jewel-like TV screen at her elbow, thinking of nothing in particular. Or, really, much in particular such as the department, and the university, and the screwing, literal and figurative, she had taken from that bastard . . . But that was already six months past, and how big a plum would it have been anyway, in a riotous, unheated Boston? . . . Susan, a forty-year-old, tall, thin woman, her brown hair cut short and severe, her thin lips pressed thinner still, thought to herself, hating herself as she thought it: I have a good face, high color, a straight nose and a strong chin. I have tits and my legs are long. Oh, for God’s sake!
Susan focused on the TV screen, a brilliant spark of color. The 8 A.M. Miami news kicked off with a fire fight between the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol and a teamster cadre after diesel fuel. In Vermont, they were shooting wood thieves at the side of the road. Then came the latest skirmish in the Arizona-California war over the water . . . At least in Boston she would have been totally involved in her profession instead of pissing away her life here in paradise . . .
The scene shifted to London, where Scottish nationalists wrecked two government buildings and killed a number of police. “No longer drunken soccer hooligans, the Scots were well-equipped with Mark Eleven Uzi automatics . . .” There was a knock on the door. Susan looked down at her drab and torn dressing gown and dashed from her living-room-kitchen combo into her small bedroom to pull on a halter and jean shorts, shouting, “Coming! Coming!” Who in Hell was calling at 8 A.M. in Hopetown, for God’s sake?
Susan smoothed her hair and pulled the door open. It was Frank Albury; well, one of the three Frank Alburys, the electronics one. “Hi, Susan,” said the portly little man, “Can I talk with you a sec?” He was perhaps thirty-five, a small roll in the gut, and completely nondescript. With an even, round, bland face and thin blond hair, he ran the island C.B. operation. An electronic wizard, Jerry Ravetz had said, but all Frank had ever talked about with Susan was the discovery of Christ and scuba diving. And she shared in this second life, in his love of the water. The first time they went together to the outer reefs where the long, hot waves broke and the massive surge ebbed and flowed over the great coral heads, Susan imagined she entered the magical Lewis story of Perelandra and the floating islands on the great-warm sea of never-Venus. Her father, a gentle classics professor, had read her all those books, Narnia, the Langs, Lord of the Rings, Oz, and as she rode the long surge of the reef looking down on its society, she flew over fairy kingdoms and the ride was magical.
But Albury watched the fish. Studying the fantastic interlocking detail of their behavior and survival, he understood absolutely that only God could make such an intricate puzzle fit together.
“Hi, Frank. Going scuba?” asked Susan.
Albury shook his head and shrugged. “Sure would like to, Susan, but we got some problems.” He looked at her and rubbed his chin. Then he pointed at the TV. “You seen that fellow in Miami, that Abaco independence fellow?”
Susan didn’t watch the TV much, but she had noticed an occasional reference on the Miami public station to such a group, one of the many splinter and terrorist gangs looking for fun and trouble in Florida. She smiled. “Is he coming over to run the place, Frank?”
Albury shrugged again. “Maybe. It looks like they got some planes and ships, Susan. From Munoz, the Florida Governor. We figure Munoz has some kind of understanding with Castro to let him go at us and Freetown, and maybe New Providence, while the Cubans work over the islands closest to them.”
Susan laughed. “Come on, Frank! I realize the U. S. is coming apart at the seams, but an attack on Abaco from the state of Florida? Are they commandeering yachts?”
Albury sat down soberly at her table. “Susan, do you know about the satellite time-lease system?”
“Sure. The Third World rental military satellites open to anyone who can pay the rip-off price. You guys subscribers?”
“The Bahamian government is. We’re monitoring Florida ship movements now, at highest resolution, and they’ve put a fleet to sea. All shallow-draft boats, tank-landing vessels with National Guard tanks, an old destroyer escort, some Coast Guard stuff.”
“Coast Guard is federal, U.S. Treasury,” said Susan.
“Susan, President Childers isn’t minding the store. The governors are all going off on their own. We think Munoz is looking to set up his own Caribbean state and shut off the flow of U.S. northerners. The Abaco energy communes look awful handy.”
“The Israelis would never work for Munoz.”
Albury looked down at his Bermuda shorts and rubbed his chubby knees. “Munoz doesn’t really understand what’s going on out here. But he probably figures they’ll either work or starve.” He looked up. “Susan, there’s a meeting of the Abaco Defense Council at ten this morning, and they asked me to come and see if you would attend.”
“The WHAT?” laughed Susan. “Abaco Defense Council, those dolts at the customs shed?”
“More than that,” said Albury seriously. “We have a command post at Marsh Harbor out at the Wind Commune Headquarters on Eastern Shore. If you could be there at ten, we surely would appreciate it, Susan.”
After Frank Albury left, Susan turned to the commercial channels and sought news of the Abaco Independence Movement, but the morning talk and game shows were in full swing. The world was breaking into tiny splinters and these fools were mesmerized by garbage . . .! Susan shook her head angrily and watched the simpering host lead a young woman through some personal sex questions . . . She flicked off the set and stared out at the palms and the gentle, sunny morning. Off across the brilliant blue and green Sea of Abaco the squat solar boilers centered in their mirror nests bulked behind the palms and white houses on Man-o-War Cay. The causeways and locks of the tidal-basin control system joined Elbow and Man-o-War by an incomprehensible network of underwater walls and control gates, all operated from a concrete building on tiny Johnnies Cay, a white spider sitting in a huge web of life and energy.
Susan rubbed her hands together and bitterly stared about her small house. Four months, and she knew nothing about this place, these people! Her book on Shastri cycles untouched. Her U.N. duties carried out just as perfunctorily as the locals could hope, from an uninvited snooper checking to see that UNESCO money wasn’t decorating casinos or whorehouses.
She had made only a few friends, and most of them among the Israelis, the other arrivés. Face it. Frank Albury was the only Abacoan who called her Susan. That’s why they sent him this morning.
She rubbed her hands back and forth across her eyes until the flashes and spots came behind the lids, and she thought about taking the drug. She probably couldn’t help them anyway; she hadn’t done her homework on Abaco. Yet her only possibility would be to vector for them. She drew back and remembered her lover, intense, brilliant, corrupt Jamie. She had used the drug with him, but he did not believe in Shastri Vector Space. And he had told the committee she was addicted to cocaine. She lost the chairmanship. That bastard . . .! She still couldn’t reconcile his tenderness and strength with . . .
Oh, Hell. She was going to dress and ride to the Marsh Harbor ferry. But just before she stepped out the door, she swallowed two small pills and popped the tiny box, not knowing what might happen, or for how long, into her skirt pocket.
Pedaling south the mile to Hopetown Harbor on her bike, Susan saw no one until she arrived at the ferry dock. There, several young Israelis and black Abacoans were wrestling some generator parts off a Wind Commune barge. The Donnie-Rocket glided into the dock right on time and disgorged several wind workers and some school children. Everything seemed very ordinary and peaceful, but the drug was doing its work and Susan vectored on the suppressed excitement among the children.
She waited quietly while they revved up the flywheel on the ferry, listening carefully to the children as they babbled, walking off down the dock.
“I is in D-south tracker, Joan!” said a little black boy excitedly. “Dat’s de whole end of the system. I is bound to get some tracks.” The boy looked back, saw Susan staring at him and abruptly and silently ran off the dock. The very incomprehensibleness of his conversation rang alarm bells in Susan’s head. What in God’s name were they up to? She turned back to watch the repowering of the Donnie-Rocket.
The large island of Abaco and its chain of cays to the north and east were linked and looped together by the ferry system, originally, the Donnies had been I.C.-engined cabin cruisers, twenty to thirty feet in length. Then in the late seventies, the gas-turbined hovercraft, the Donnie-Rockets, had arrived, spectacular, high speed, and kerosene guzzling. Although the relatively new Swiss flywheel boats now ran in total silence, the name, Donnie-Rocket, had stuck with them, for they still went like blazes, up on their stalky foils, forty feet of praying mantis doing thirty-five knots.
The captain of this Donnie-Rocket was skinny, fourteen-year-old Gerald Beans, black as night with a head like a chestnut burr. He cut off the magnetic clutch and signaled the dock superintendent to hoist the torque bar out of the Donnie’s engine compartment. Down below, in a hard vacuum, six tons of steel flywheel spun in perfectly vibration-free gas bearings at over twenty-thousand revolutions per minute. Captain Beans noticed Susan’s intense inspection of the Donnie-Rocket’s power plant and flashed her a great many large white teeth. “Plenty of crayfish to buy that wheel, Dr. Peabody,” he suggested.
But Susan, fully into the drug, suddenly, blindingly, saw how incredibly little she had seen in Abaco. These children and their talk. A fourteen-year-old ferry captain. This incredibly diverse technology. The Israelis, their energy communes, Governor Munoz and Fidel Castro. She was staggered at the vector complexity, and yet the alarm bell in her head was clanging continuously. She suddenly realized she had not thought of Jamie for at least ten minutes, and she smiled, really grinned in fact, at Captain Beans.
The Donnie-Rocket ambled out of Hopetown Harbor as a displacement boat, past the tall, old red-striped lighthouse with its 130-year-old Trinity House lamp and spring-driven occulting gear. Then Captain Beans clutched the propellers into the flywheel more strongly, and they rose up and scooted for Marsh Harbor. The only other passenger, an Israeli computer specialist whom Susan hardly knew, was studying an instruction manual. So Captain Beans turned to Susan. “Did you see that crazy Abaco independence man on TV, Dr. Peabody?”
Susan shook her head. “I didn’t watch it last night, Gerald. Is he really nutty?”
Gerald Beans whistled and nodded his head. “Mad as can be, I think. But he’s not the real one, I think. Those politicians want us . . . Abaco. All these kilowatts!”
“Yes,” said Susan. “We Americans had all the toys, but they’ve gotten broken and we waited too long to fix them. All we can see to do is steal from somebody else.”
“Those folks up north, with the snows. Who are they going to steal from?” asked Captain Beans.
Susan, distracted in her attempts to vector Abaco and its problems, looked at the boy sharply. “They’ll steal from each other, I suppose, Gerald. We had it awfully soft for a very long time.”
“Then,” said Captain Beans inexorably, “why won’t Abaco get the same way?” and Susan found she had no answer.
The Donnie-Rocket made a side trip up Sugar Loaf Creek to drop Susan at the big dock of the Wind Commune Headquarters. For the first time she saw a group of young Abacoans with side arms and some Uzi whistle guns on slings. One of them, a customs agent in fact, detached himself and nodded politely. “They’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Peabody,” he said. “Let me show you the way.”
She followed the soldier in his short khaki pants and knee socks up a path brilliant with bougainvillaea, the soft coral crunching underfoot. As she walked, Susan watched a big instrument kite leave its launching rack on the top of the building and climb into the sky. The local wind communes in the South Abaco area were fed data from here, and from similar installations on Man-o-War and Hopetown.
On-line computers continuously load-matched the entire system and updated weather predictions. Susan tried to remember who had worked the kites out. The Swedes? The French?
The soldier held open a door and Susan stepped into a large, dim, air-conditioned room with picture-window views of the entire horizon. Around the walls under the almost continuous windows were the various consoles of the wind engineers: instrument boards, video readouts, and interactive computer monitors. The entire center of the room was now filled with a long plain table at which sat perhaps twenty people. Susan looked at her watch. It was just ten. “Sorry,” she said to the seated people, “Frank Albury told me . . .” she noticed Albury in a chair . . . “You told me ten, Frank.”
Albury popped to his feet and the other men followed. “You’re right on time, Susan. We haven’t started.” They had, of course, started. They had been talking about her. Susan looked curiously around at the Abaco Defense Council and selected a chair next to Jerry Ravetz, toward which she walked. She was fully vectoring now, and selecting that chair had involved a certain extension of mental activity. She suddenly realized that Ravetz, with whom she was friendly, was perhaps the most important person in the room. Provost of the Abaco Technical College and called Jerry by almost everyone, Ravetz seemed to represent all the Israelis in Abaco in some generalized and unstructured way. And much of the new technology of Abaco, the energy farms, the huge, still-building thermocline system, the tidal impoundments running laminar-flow, low-head turbines, the crayfish farms, all were basically Israeli-engineered. As she mentally projected various vector trees, she began to see how it must have developed. Kilowatts were not the only problem!
“Hi, Jerry,” she said firmly.
Ravetz smiled cheerfully. “Hi, Susan, sorry to bother you, but we do seem to have this little . . . ah . . . problem with the State of Florida.” Several of the men around her grinned.
“You’ve got plenty of problems, Jerry,” said Susan, and she did not smile. As was often the case of retrospective vectoring, the picture was clearing even as she spoke. “For one thing, you should never have left Fidel out of all this. Who else is Munoz thick with? There’s some kind of Washington connection in this, Jerry.”
Ravetz, a stocky, crew-cut man in his forties, wearing white tennis shorts and a purple T-shirt, blinked and let his smile slip away, turning to peer more carefully at Susan and her bright, sharp eyes. “It’s a little late to get geopolitical, Susan. We may be under attack before dark.”
At that moment a tall black man in the same simple khaki uniform as the soldiers walked briskly into the room. He was about forty, lean and muscled, and it was perfectly evident that now he was in charge. Susan looked and looked, then turned to Ravetz. “Who is that, Jerry?”
Ravetz smiled again, “Colonel John Gillam, C. in C. of all Abaco defense forces and presently the acting military governor of Abaco,” he whispered.
“Jerry,” said Susan rather more loudly than she intended, “that’s my garbage man!”
Colonel Gillam turned and smiled frostily the length of the table at Susan. “I do the garbage when things are quiet, Dr. Peabody. It’s a way of . . . keeping an eye on things. I’m sure we’ll have this Florida business under control in a day or so. Don’t worry about the Friday pickup. I’ll get your stuff.” His voice was like ice. His eyes glinted and his big fat lower lip jutted red and wet at her. Susan flinched at the shock of his hostility. Here was one real hard conch eater, a North American hater. She was at this table over his dead body! He had obviously refused to even be present when they discussed what to tell her.
