Denver Is Missing

by D. F. Jones

  My personal burden as the one responsible for triggering this fearful cataclysm is only alleviated by the conviction that sooner or later this would have happened, in any case. It is awful, awful.

  I am old, and do not expect, nor wish, to survive this dreadful period in our country’s history. Profit by my example. Man can be too arrogant, too overweening in his desires and ambitions.

  One final piece of advice. If you have not read that excellent book by Nevil Shute, On the Beach, I commend it to you, especially where he deals with winds.

  I wish you well, my boy, and hope you may be preserved in all this. You have it in you to be a good scientist, and when this is ended, as surely one day it must be, you will be needed to rebuild your country. Then you will repay the debt you now incur. Goodbye my boy.

  Yours

  Michael Suffren

  That letter really shook me. This was no cold, impersonal print, but word from someone who was important to me, his last letter, the last word of one who already considered himself dead, and even more terrible than that, was glad to go.

  Chapter 17

  I ignored the rest of my companions, and went on deck, my throat hurting. The evening sun, glittering on the sea, mocked my mood. I stepped ashore, irresolute, not knowing if I wanted company to engage my mind, or solitude to think of Suffren….

  “That your boat, son?” The speaker was a parchment-faced man, well into his sixties. A gay flowered shirt hung over his Bermuda shorts, yet concealed little of his sagging stomach. Under one arm there was a bulging briefcase. Tired, anxious eyes peered out from under a long-peaked baseball cap.

  “No, sir. I’m only one of the crew.”

  He took that in, hesitating. Behind him in a large figured print dress was a short, tubby woman who could only be his wife. One heavily ringed hand clutched a well-filled beach bag, the other was prodding him.

  “Son, d’you suppose your skipper would take us aboard —just to sleep nights. I’d pay well—”

  If the situation had not been so tragic, it would have been screamingly funny. Two less suitable figures for Mayfly were hard to imagine. “I’m very sorry, but there just isn’t the room—”

  “I’ll pay twenty dollars a night—just to sleep—no food.” I could only repeat, “I’m sorry, there’s no room.” I disliked the man and his wife on sight, but felt desperately sorry for them.

  “Thirty dollars! We’d be no trouble—”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” By God! I was….

  The wife spoke, pulling his shirt. “C’mon, Ed.”

  With hardly a glance they moved off slowly, her fat ankles bulging over the cutting straps of her shoes; his thin, veined legs moving unwillingly. I had ceased to exist in their new, frightening world, yet ten seconds before I had been the center of their hope and attention.

  Looking down the quay, I saw with new understanding another couple, slowly moving, hopefully, hopelessly, in our direction…. I turned and jumped back aboard.

  “Bill—let’s get outta here! We don’t have to stay!”

  He was smoking, carefully writing up his log. Bette was sitting quietly, mending a shirt. Karen, hands in lap, was doing nothing. Bill finished his entry, closed the book, and looked at me, his face impassive, but his eyes alert.

  “No, we don’t, but are you sure you want to go? This is still the USA, you know.”

  “It’s not my USA!” I spoke with real feeling.

  “Or mine!” echoed Karen.

  Bette said nothing, but continued with her mending. “You’ve got to be sure. This is the last fully civilized port of call with good transport facilities we’re likely to get this side of Australia.”

  “I’ll take that chance!”

  Karen nodded vigorously. “That goes for me, too!”

  Bette had finished her work. She knew we were all waiting for her to speak, but she wasn’t going to be rushed. She folded the shirt carefully and put it on the shelf behind her head. Then she spoke.

  “Are you really sure you want to go on with us, Bill?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “Truly?”

  “Good God, yes! What a suspicious shower you are!” He smiled at her. “I’ve never had it so good! Fine cooking, four watches at sea, good company and medical attention if I need it!” He’d worked us all into that list, very neatly. “Of course I want you, all of you! Does that satisfy you?”

  “Okay, Bill.” I asserted myself. “When can we sail?”

  “Well, we can do the final shopping tomorrow morning —a final top-up with water and a shower, how about a start after an early lunch?” He had the true mark of an Englishman, a mastery of the art of understatement. This suggestion, coming from him, sounded like a proposed drive to the country club for drinks before dinner.

  As with most things Bill arranged, we moved out on schedule. He and Bette had not enjoyed their “run ashore” any more than Karen and I had. We’d all showered, caught up with our laundry, and now faced the next leg of our journey with relief and confidence. I recalled wryly that it was near here that the original Mohole drill was to have been made, and wondered what that might have led to…. The wind was light, and we made poor progress. Atdawn next morning the islands were still in sight astern, Mauna Loa a black outline against the rising sun.

  During our night watch, I had told Bette about Suffren’s letter, but for some inexplicable reason, did not feel inclined to tell Bill and Karen. She had only said, “He was, in his way, a great-man, Mitch. You should feel honored that you had his friendship.”

  I had mumbled some sort of answer, noting that she spoke of him in the past tense.

  During the morning the wind freshened, and by midday the Hawaiian Islands had vanished. Once more we were alone in our close little world, meshed into one small, tight unit by the rigid routine. Bill had increased our stock of batteries, and with the disappearance of land, our interest in the radio increased.

  Medium wave reception of Honolulu was not too bad. External dealings in the dollar had been suspended, devaluation was obviously imminent, and that had rocked sterling. The world’s economy was fast heading for chaos. The execution of looters in Chicago had been televised “as a warning.” There was a new order in force in the northern states: drivers of unauthorized cars would be shot on sight. Unspecified trouble with unemployed workers had occurred in Detroit and the abandonment of Denver was admitted. The UN had moved to Geneva, Switzerland. There was an ominous silence about SARAH.

  That evening I told Bill about Suffren’s letter, for I did not understand the reference to On the Beach, and Bette was no help. Bill pulled his nose at the plant news, and with typical understatement, described it as “rather nasty.” The book reference he got at once.

  “That,” he said gravely, “is even nastier. I assume Professor Suffren was worried about the possibility of censorship, and was banking on the hard-pressed censor not understanding him, and not having the time to find out. The implication’s obvious. Suffren thinks that the air pollution may affect more than part of the States and Canada, which, frankly, I find hard to believe. You see, there are two wind systems, one in the northern, one in the southern hemisphere. There is some exchange between them, but if something happens in one, it is more likely to spread evenly over that one before it slowly permeates into the other half. In Shute’s book, this was the spread of radioactivity after a nuclear war. The northern hemisphere was finished, and the radioactivity slowly spread south. If my guess is right, he suggests that the whole northern hemisphere atmosphere may be dangerously diluted.”

  “So the idea of Australia and New Zealand is a pretty good one?”

  “Yes.” He shrugged. “Suffren’s saying, in essence, get the hell out of the northern hemisphere, don’t go wandering off toward India or Malaysia; they too may well be affected. I find it hard to credit that.”

  So did I. Suffren’s mind might have caved in under the strain, but I doubted it. His letter was a little wild in parts, but then, so was Suf
fren, even at the best of times. Of course, Bill’s evaluation of Suffren’s hint could be wrong, but I doubted that as well.

  Two days later the wind faded, and finally vanished altogether, and Mayfly came to a stop, rolling uncomfortably, sails flapping, no longer a live thing, but an ungainly conglomeration of spars and canvas, planks and ropes. The sun beat down viciously, pitch oozed from the deck seams, and the sea like molten glass was painful to the eye.

  “This,” Bill informed us cheerfully, “is the Doldrums. Here we wait in limbo, drifting. At this time of the year, this belt of still air is usually narrow, so we may be soon out of it. We’re drifting with the Counter Equatorial Current, which may set us a bit to the east, but provided it doesn’t last too long, so that water gets short, it’s nothing to worry about—but it’s damned irritating. Now, let’s go through the boat, and cut down on some of this noise.”

  It seems a trivial point, but the regular tapping of a block against the mast, after a few hours, gets to be like the Chinese water torture. Bette proved to be a particularly relentless hunter-down of odd noises.

  We endured another twenty-four hours of it, spending the daylight hours baking in the cabin, which was better than frying on deck, longing for the night. Of course, we could not get a damned thing on the radio.

  After another day of it, Bill began to look thoughtful. Those fiendish blocks were forever easing off their lashings sufficiently to start tapping again, and fraying our nerves in the process. We all swam, morning and evening, but that was a pleasure we could well have done without, especially where I was concerned. With the nearest land four miles away—straight down—plus the possibility of sharks, I considered it an overrated pastime. A particularly depressing detail was that if you tossed a wrapper over the side, it stayed there, drifting with you, until it sank.

  On the next day Bill decided to start the engine. We had four five-gallon jerricans of gasoline lashed to the rail right aft, and I guessed that Bill was none too keen on keeping them in that heat, despite the frequently renewed damp cloths we had draped over them. He said it would be best to have the benefit of movement during the hottest part of the day, and just before lunch he started up. Our spirits rose as the engine chugged into life, and we turned south. Even the slight air movement this gave was great. We shut down at sunset; two of our cans had gone into the tanks.

  The pattern was repeated the next day; from midday until the late afternoon we plugged steadily south. By then all our spare fuel had gone, and Bill was not prepared to touch the main supply. He cut the engine, and we were back, hunting noises. For all the difference in our surroundings, we might have been standing still.

  At supper, Bill said in his usual genial way that, much as he liked having clean women around him, this was a luxury we could no longer afford. Even the meager allowance we had had for this purpose, a pint a day, was out. He added that the sea was still available for those who wanted it. Once more we tried the radio and got nothing. It was as if we had dropped right out of the world. No wind, no rain, no radio, only the all-powerful sun and the deserted, blinding sea.

  That night Bette and I had the bunk. We lay naked, with hardly a thought for the US, or SARAH—or each other. My mind could think of nothing except large tankards of cold beer. Bette was silent—sleep was difficult in the hat, and there wasn’t room for all of us on deck— holding my hand, keeping her thoughts to herself. From time to time we dozed, and I must have been doing just that, for I was awakened around 4 A.M. by the sound of movement and the pad of bare feet. I listened, and recognized the sound. Bill was getting the mainsail up. Excited, I hopped out of the bunk and ran on deck into the bright starlight.

  “All right, Bill?”

  Karen was curled up on the stem locker, and he answered softly, “Yes. Don’t get too excited, but I think we have a slight breeze.”

  I resented that. “Who’s excited? Just thought you might need a hand!”

  He came aft from the mast; I saw the gleam of his teeth as he grinned. “Okay, so you’re not—but if you stand around like that much longer, Karen may be!”

  Essentially a modest guy, I retired hastily.

  By dawn we had a gentle breeze from the east on our beam, and although we were not exactly booming along, at least we were moving, and in the right direction. As the day wore on, the breeze freshened, and by evening we were making a good four knots. It was an enormous relief.

  Life woke up in other ways, too. The radio worked, which was a mixed blessing. We could not get a US station, but Sydney, Australia, came in strongly. Once more we sat silent and appalled.

  Storm damage across the States was extensive. Over half a million people had been, or were being, evacuated to Australia. Reception camps were being set up outside Sydney and Melbourne, and in Tasmania. “Dome Cities,” for the use of essential services in high altitudes and urban concentrations, were being erected across the States as fast as they could be produced. The unauthorized extraction of oxygen from the atmosphere was now a court-martial offense. But there was practically no real news of what conditions were like. Was Chicago suffocating slowly—or quickly—or was the evident disruption of the city mainly due to panic? There was no news of this sort. One item that had Bill sitting up was the report that the British Royal Air Force had established an air-sampling patrol in mid-Atlantic.

  The passage of the Doldrums marked a new phase in our travels; from then on, the pace quickened…. Next day, for almost the first time since Hawaii, we saw some clouds, and we had plenty of wind. Mayfly was crashing along, and once more, spray over the deck was no novelty. Now we were in the southeast trades.

  For three days we plowed on, making excellent progress in perfect sailing weather. In other ways also the Fates were kind to us—the seemingly empty ocean now teemed with life. We passed through a mass of Portuguese men-o-war, those strangely beautiful “sails” iridescent in the sun, and we sighted a distant school of whales. More to the point, we caught some fish, which Bill pronounced edible, and they were, which made a welcome change in our diet.

  We were approaching the outer islands of Polynesia, which may have accounted for our good reception of Sydney radio. Australian interest in the islands is considerable, and the transmission was probably beamed to this area. Whatever the reason, we got Sydney regularly.

  The complete evacuation of San Francisco was admitted, which did not surprise me, but another admission was a shock. Chicago, it was said, was sunk in anarchy, and “major disturbances” had occurred in New York and Philadelphia…. And after the news, the emergency orders all green-leaf crops to be left standing until they died, food production was of secondary importance; all stock market dealings suspended; all foreign assets in the US frozen.

  Once more, it was Bette who was most affected by the news, and if she had had her way, we wouldn’t have listened. Very fortunately, this was one time she lost out, for Bill had begun to take more than a detached interest from the British angle. An Air Pollution Conference had been set up, meeting in Paris. Russian, Polish, and Czech delegates were taking part. The assurance that this was a “purely precautionary” examination of the problem did not convince Bill. No doubt he was remembering Suffren’s prediction.

  After a midday sunsight, Bill announced with his usual proviso—“with luck”—we might soon sight our first Polynesian island. We were off the Phoenix group; somewhere northeast of Enderbury Island. If the wind held fair, we would aim for the Ellice Island, for water; if it turned foul, we would try for the Phoenix group.

  By this time, we felt as if we had spent all our lives at sea. Increasingly, the regular doses of bad news appeared to refer to another, different life, and seemed totally unreal to us. Of more importance in our circumscribed lives was the prospect of being able to walk more than six paces in any one direction. Bette’s idea in Hawaii of a walk for all concerned looked a lot less silly by this time. So supper was a relatively cheery meal, and there were some pretty smart cracks flying back and forth. We tuned into
Sydney radio in a contented, self-satisfied state of mind, which is fatal.

  But that was before we heard the news. In a few terse, urgent sentences, the flat-voiced Australian announcer jerked the carpet from under us, and shattered our tight little world.

  In one vast, final burst, beyond anything recorded history had ever known, SARAH had collapsed, finished…. We stiffened, fear swamped us, for clear across three thousand miles of ocean, in death, SARAH was reaching out to grasp us.

  That morning, a stupendous earth movement had occurred off the West Coast of the United States. What had happened in California was, as yet, unknown. Every observatory in the entire world had registered the shock, one of unparalleled magnitude. It was also known that one final, vast puff of gas had been released, marking the end of SARAH. It was also believed that a very large area of the eastern Pacific, bordering on the US, had collapsed, and this had set up a chain of gigantic tidal waves. No accurate estimate had been made of their height, but they were believed to be in excess of fifty feet, and were moving outward at approximately sixty miles an hour. Secondary movements, probably caused by the subterranean shock wave, had taken place in Alaska, Japan, and the foggy Aleutians. More might be expected. The bulletin ended with the news, now vital to us, that further bulletins would be issued at hourly intervals, until further notice.

  We sat, frozen with horror. This was so much worse than expectation. Poor Karen, who had the watch, and had caught only odd snatches of the news, broke the spell.

  “What’s happened! Someone, please tell me! Please!”

  As might be expected, Bill moved first. His face was set, lined, and ten years older. He spoke curtly. “Bette. Clear this table. Don’t just dump the stuff. Stow it properly. Mitch, get the large-scale Pacific chart out.”

  He stuck his head out of the hatch. “There’s been a bad earthquake off California; damage has been extensive.” His voice was harsh, commanding. “Keep your mind on the job, and keep quiet. I’ll give you more details later.”