A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “Chiqui, come here and look at the chart. We’re right here. I want you to sail well off shore to pick up the breeze and then down to here.” He stabbed at the map. “There’s a little bluff over the beach, flat on top. It’s an easy climb.”

  “I been there,” she said. McCree’s kids were mad for the windsurfers, they were forever sailing up and down the coast alone and in groups.

  “Take one of the others, if you can find someone quickly. But sail as fast as you can. When you get there, hide your boats. Climb up on the bluff. Look down the coast to see what’s coming. You’ve got binoculars in the pack. When you see whatever it is coming up the coast, set up the radio. Point the antenna up toward the top of Yunque mountain.” He demonstrated. “Talk in here. Tell us what you see. Be sure to count how many boats there are and note what they look like. Don’t leave your position till I tell you. Let them sail right past you, reporting everything that you see. Don’t worry, because they won’t be able to hear your transmission. But don’t let them see you.”

  “You got it Loren. I’ll bring Kendra with me. She’s right outside.”

  “Go.” He shoved the pack into her hands, slapped her on the back as she headed off. Loren raced back for the radio. “Celestine, come in Celestine, this is Loren on the beach.”

  “Celestine, here, Loren. This is Jared.”

  “Jared, we’ve got something coming up the beach from the west.”

  “I heard.”

  “I’ve got two windsurfers on the way. They can do 14 knots or more on a reach, so they should be able to get all the way to the bluffs over Maguana before whatever it is comes into view. I want you to sail due west from where you are for an hour. When you pick up the blip, hang back. Don’t show yourselves. Stay up-wind. Keep them just out of sight, over the horizon.”

  “Done.”

  If this was the attack, he’d been wrong all the time. They were coming up the coast, not down with the wind behind them. If he had been less sure of his now possibly disproved theory, he’d have had lookouts in place above Maguana and the girls wouldn’t have to race down there now. Loren raised the other two patrol vessels to make sure they kept their stations to the north. Then he went outside to the brass bell mounted beside the shack. He grabbed its rope handle and rang it hard for a full minute. Within minutes now they would have another fourteen vessels underway.

  Let this not be it, he thought. Let this not be the real thing. Because the link to SHIELA was still not working. Because there was a pile of details still not attended to. People were starting to arrive on the run, all dressed in their blues. He watched one slender young woman hurry past him, dragging a canvas bag full of machetes toward the dock. Let it not come to that.

  Back in the shack, Loren threw off his shorts, ignoring the crowds running past the open door. He pulled on his blue jump suit. A moment later he was on the dock beside Columbia. Kelly was already there, casting off the bow line. He counted off his crew. All seventeen were on board and ready as planned. He cast off the stern cable and the spring line himself. Let this be a drill, just a drill. They sailed away neatly from the dock with Loren at the helm. Within fifteen minutes they were reaching down the coast at nearly eight knots. Loren looked at his watch. Contact in about seventy minutes at this rate. But it’s just going to be a drill. There wasn’t going to be an attacking armada, only a Chinese fisherman or floating debris.

  Behind him stretched out the fleet. It looked for all the world like the day races he had crewed in with Homer on Cayuga, yachts and yachtsmen out for a pleasant day in the sun and wind. Only the machetes around the deck and the too few mounted crossbows said differently. Some of the boats behind him had set flat reaching spinnakers. What was the hurry? Would it be better to fight further down the shore, he wondered? Or were they just in a hurry to get started. He was thinking his numbers over again: six boats deployed to the north in case this was just a feint. He still expected the invasion to come from the north, not the west. Six to the north, eight to the west plus Celestine approaching from her station twenty miles off shore, three still off on the expedition to Guantanamo. That left two in reserve to go north or west, whichever he told them. They would be holding back now just offshore from Baracoa. He tried to remember who was in charge of each one. He could see Captain Van Hooten at the helm of Irena, only twenty meters off the beam. Just behind him was Candace Hopkins in command of Kiruna. The breeze was twenty knots and freshening. On deck, his blue suited crew were rigging a spinnaker and pole. They waited for him to give the OK to raise it. He did, not wanting to arrive late to his own battle. Loren felt Columbia surge forward as the sail caught, causing the graceful cutter to slide, surfing down the front of the following sea. He had caught a glimpse of Sonia on the beach as they set out, surrounded with children. She had not waved.

  “Hello Loren. It’s Chiqui.” It was the light-wave radio receiver in the cockpit beside him. Kelly passed him the handset.

  “Go ahead Chiqui.”

  “I got him in sight. An old man on a catamaran. Just one. Coming up the coast like a bandit. He’s got white hair. Nothing behind him. Nothing. But I’m still watching.”

  “Good. Stay there, Chiqui. Hello Celestine, did you hear.”

  “Yes, Loren. We have him in our radar.”

  “Pick him up. Be careful.”

  “Done.”

  Loren began giving instructions to the fleet to haul their wind, starting with the aftermost vessel. Within minutes they were all beating back up to the east to preserve their position if, after all, there was something coming from the direction of Little Inagua Island. He checked his watch again. They would be back in position before Baracoa Bay within an hour.

  One man on a cat: It had just been a drill. He would keep the two girls in place on the bluffs for a few more hours, just in case, but it had almost certainly just been a drill. With a little luck they would soon have one more recruit, and one more precious boat.

  Proctor Pinkham came up from below, a sheaf of scribbled notes in his hand. His blue jumpsuit was stretched tight across his paunch.

  “A false alarm, Ted. Just a drill. Some old guy out for a sail. Jared is bringing him in.”

  The Proctor nodded. “I heard. We’ll want to send Palomar out on station to replace Celestine.” Kelly nodded and got on the radio to pass on the order. “I’m thinking too, Loren, of setting the patrol stations much farther out. Now that they can stay out for three days or more, they might better take up their positions in the Bahama Channel itself, say eighty miles out. That will give us a good twelve hours of warning. With that much time, we can meet well out to sea, so that any gas they tried to release during the battle would miss the island entirely. What do you think?”

  “Good idea.”

  “We got away in sixteen minutes, not so great. I’m going to keep all the boats at the dock from now on. We can run them out to anchor only when there’s a storm. And I’m going to have two people sleep on each one. When the alarm sounds, they can begin getting sails on the deck and laying out sheets. We got caught half asleep this morning. Sixteen minutes. Damn.” He turned to look back over the fleet. “Slow, but pretty smooth, all in all. Our first scramble and no mishaps. Thank you everybody. It was a good job, Loren. Sending the windsurfers was a cute trick. I wonder if I would have thought of that.” He turned and made his way back down the companionway, shaking his head. Kelly was grinning at Loren.

  The old man in the catamaran was Lamar Armitage. He had bicycled down from Washington to the Keys and there stolen the little boat to make the ninety mile crossing over to Cuba. From his landfall, he had traveled east along the coast for nearly six hundred miles. The whole trip had taken him thirteen days. Loren found him in the cockpit of the Celestine, back at the dock. He looked terrible, sunburned and peeling, exhausted. Edward was bending over him.

  “Jesus, Lamar, almost seven hundred miles on catamaran. Couldn’t you have picked something more comfortable.”

  “Had to be quick.” H
is voice was hoarse. Loren noticed that his lips were cracked and caked with salt. “Catamarans are quick. Quick but not too pleasant. I came the whole ninety miles over in one day. Up the coast, I pushed on as long as I could each day. I had to bring you something. I was in a hurry.”

  “This is Loren Martine. Lamar Armitage.” Ed made the introduction.

  Armitage smiled up weakly at Loren. “Discrete algebras to explain particle fields,” he said. “I read your piece. Nice bit of work.”

  Loren shook his hand. Proctor Pinkham was right behind him. Loren made the introduction. “Dr. Armitage, this is Proctor Pinkham, the Admiral of our little fleet. Dr. Armitage is a scientist from Johns Hopkins University. We’ve heard a lot about him from Edward, so we expect he is going to be a big help to our cause.”

  “I brought you this. Armitage held up the plastic knapsack he had been guarding. Loren found it surprisingly heavy. Inside was a black Inovo laptop computer. “You can raise SHIELA with it,” he said. “And the Revelation program. It weighs a ton. I wanted to toss it overboard every minute. But Revelation-13 could be a help.”

  “Yes, we thought of that. We’re setting up our own computer now. But this second unit will be a help.”

  “They’ll come with gas, you know. With nerve gas. It’s to be the Cuba Libre Plan, all over. Only this time they’ll be using their own gas.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  “Ah, you thought of that. I could have rested along the way. I should have guessed you would think of that. Les grands esprits se retrouvent, as the French say. Great minds are always on the same track.”

  Kelly had brought Homer down to meet the new arrival. When he stepped on board, Armitage jumped up. He and Homer had never met face to face, but they had known each other’s work for decades.

  “Doctor Layton.” He took Homer’s hand in his own. His hand was trembling. Then he did something that left them all shocked. He went down onto one knee in front of Homer.

  “Here now. What is this craziness? Doctor Armitage. My friend. Stand up here with the rest of us.”

  “Doctor Layton…” There were tears in his lashes, beginning to run down through the salty grime over his cheeks. “I think you have saved my soul, Doctor Layton. It’s not a small thing. Because, you see, I could have stopped the whole fiasco if I had spoken up at the right time. So all those deaths that you prevented were going to be on my soul.”

  “But you are down there on the deck. And we are all up here. So you have to get up. Lamar.” Homer dragged him to his feet. “There now. Now we can have a proper conversation. Only no souls please. The soul is problematic. Sometimes you got one, sometimes it leaves you flat. We got to talk physics, you and me. We got a lot of things to talk about. We could talk about a bath for you. And about food. We do food here, really well. This man could use a beer, I think. And a good sleep. There is an extra bed in my cottage, so you can bunk in with me. That way, we can talk in the night when everybody else is asleep except us old guys. Loren, did you see who we got here? Lamar Armitage. The Lamar Armitage. Special Attractors Armitage. He is the man who thought up the whole theory of Special Attractors. Beautiful stuff.”

  Armitage had one hand on Homer’s arm. “It is Andronescu’s Paradox, isn’t it? It is Andronescu’s Paradox that has stopped up the whole world, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes, Andronescu. Old Andronescu from the ETH. A friend of mine, you know. I knew him way back when. When he was alive. Yes, it was Andronescu’s idea that led us to the answer of Peculiar Motion. And from there, it was just a hop and a skip to turning everything off. I thought it might be best to throw the switch, seeing as how the world was about to end.”

  “And you saved my…saved me by doing that. Saved me from having all those lives on my conscience.”

  “Oh well, why not. Now I’ve got a few on mine instead.”

  Proctor Pinkham had drifted alone over to the rail, savoring the words “admiral of our small fleet.” Now he came back to address Armitage: “How did you know we would be here, sir? How did you know where to find us?”

  “A game of chess, my friend. With the board you had, where else would you go? Upwind for the advantage and to protect the Passage. That’s where they’ll come. They’ll come sailing down for the Windward Passage. So you had to be here to stop them. He nodded up toward the hills. “There’s probably some hydro-power up in those hills, too.”

  “Yes,” said the Proctor. “That’s just how we doped it out.”

  “Les grands esprits,” repeated Armitage.

  22

  KEESHA AND ADJOUAN

  The matter of Keesha and Adjouan was, in Proctor Pinkham’s view, immediately at the intersection of his two areas of commitment: campus discipline and national defense. They were a discipline problem, so he had decided to ship them off on a defense mission. But while he was at it, he would also give them a little lecture. Young people, he thought, could always use a good lecture on the linked nature of freedom and responsibility:

  “Freedom and Responsibility, you might say, are rather linked in nature.” He looked off thoughtfully through the window toward the beach beside the dock, as if choosing his words with care. His forehead was furrowed. You might think he had never given this particular lecture before, though he had in fact given it hundreds of times. “We are entrusted with a great deal of freedom, freedom to govern our own actions as adults. And with that freedom comes an associated responsibility, don’t you see? This is part of the passage from childhood to adulthood. The pleasures of adulthood come hand in hand with the obligations. We willingly embrace those pleasures, as we should. And they are substantial indeed. Consider for example, the privilege we are given to enjoy all the wonders of this university, or that is, this island. Our forefathers would have been held in awe at the magnificence of our freedoms: the freedom to come and go as we please, to travel by plane and automobile, for example, though, strictly speaking, that particular freedom is somewhat compromised at the moment. But you see my point.”

  As had invariably been the case through all his years of experience, these two malefactors were grinning at him. What is it with young people, anyway? Why is absolutely everything a joke? “Now in the case of your particular offense…” He looked down at the pad on the desk before him, where he had earlier written out the details. Everything he wrote was in his own special code, you can’t be too careful in police work. The bill of particulars on these two included “susp. of n.” And n., in the Proctor’s code, stood for illicit sexual activity, or nooky.

  “Chandler, or that is, Senator Hopkins has called to my attention the seriousness of even an appearance of impropriety. With so many young children in our community — our population is more than 40% under the age of 16, you know — well, the Senator is persuaded that we need to effect the very most decorous behavior. And particularly one in a position of teacher, Miss Keesha…”

  “Teacher’s aide, actually. I am nineteen years old.” She was every bit the model for what nineteen ought to be: bright-eyed, pretty, slender, healthy. Her long black hair was gathered behind the neck with a ribbon and spread out from there down the back of her blue jumpsuit. The accent, Proctor Pinkham suspected, was from the islands, perhaps Trinidad, judging from the rounded vowels. In spite of her heavy accent, she formed each word perfectly.

  “Yes, well. Still in all, when one is a role model for the young, Miss…, is Keesha your first name or your last?”

  “It’s just Keesha.”

  “Oh. And as for yourself, Mr. Elijah, you too are a role model for the younger members of Mr. McCree’s group. What the Senator is attempting to achieve, in the light of our responsibility to set a good example for the children, is a kind of Victorianism. This imposes on all of us the obligation to sublimate our passions, you see. All of us. Now I don’t know what it was that the Senator saw you two doing. And I don’t want to know, either. But I understand that it was not entirely decorous, not exactly Victorian.”

  Laughter was bubbling up
from deep in Adjouan’s belly. “It is entirely the fault of this young lady, sir.” He voice was musical. “I am a proper boy from a good religious home. Victorianism is my very second nature.”

  “Well, I never,” said Keesha, affecting outrage. “I am more Victorian than this young delinquent could ever know. Why I am blushing hotly just to hear such talk, though it does not show because of my rich pigmentation.” As she spoke, she was leaning into Adjouan’s thigh, rubbing against him.

  Proctor Pinkham sighed. Baracoa Village could become a disaster in the next few years with such an example for the little ones. He cringed at the thought of so much new sexuality exploding as their young people came blossoming out of puberty, probably all on the same day.

  “As you can imagine, it is quite impossible for us to allow our children in their formative years, to be exposed to…”

  Keesha interrupted, “But what do you want them to learn, Mr. Pinkham? Don’t you want them to understand about love? I am a healthy young woman and Adjouan is a hunk. So of course…um, you do know what a ‘hunk’ is, don’t you?”

  “No, but I get the idea.”

  “Well, those are the facts of life, honey.”

  “Quite. The Senator has suggested that I send you off on missions somewhere to separate you from these temptations, that is, to separate you from each other. And, even more important, to put you out of sight of our young people, whom we shall succeed in impressing with the need for decorum.” The Proctor was simply in love with the term “decorum” and all its derivatives. “As it happens, we do have assignments that would achieve the desired end of taking you away from the village and from each other.”