Edward Llewellyn

by Prelude to Chaos

That memory had touched some nerve. I returned to Barbara. “How could she have had a boat allotted to her at seventeen?”

  “By being good and proving It, I suppose!”

  “She seems to be good at everything.”

  “She’s also damned pretty and has every boy in the Settle-ment after her ass!” Judith could be as crude as any other educated woman when she wanted to be. “I’ve heard quite enough about that girl for tonight Don’t get ideas! She’s out of your age group! More important, what are your plan$9 now you’ve deposited me safely here?”

  “I’d like to stay awhile. Perhaps do the same job I was doing at Sherando.”

  “No!” Her green eyes flashed in the firelight. “For God’s sake, don’t mention Sherando. Or any other violent job you’ve done. They’ll try to throw you out if you do. Yackle and the Council abhor violence. They’re peaceable folk here. I haven’t told them where we’ve been or what we’ve done. And they won’t ask.” Her voice grew calmer. “As far as the Council is concerned you’re an electronics tech. And a good one. They need an electronics tech. You’ve seen the amount of electronics they have around. And the techs they’ve got are outdated.”

  “Do you think they’ll let me stop over? Yackle was really spooked when he found I wasn’t a Believer.”

  “Do you want to stay?”

  “Only if you do.”

  She studied me with her clinical stare. Then her eyes became warm and her smile female. “I’ll make sure they let you.” She put her arms around me, kissed me with a mouth that was no longer hard and firm but passionate and soft. “Let’s go to bed! I’ve been trying to get you there all the evening.”

  1 woke once during the night to lie close against Judith’s smooth curves; comforted by her nearness, by the scent of her hair, by her gentle breathing. Breathing as regular as the rhythm of the seas running into the Cove.

  The thunder of rollers breaking onto the beach, the rumble of shingle sucked back by retreating waves. Sea sounds from my boyhood. As I drifted into sleep I drifted back in time. Back to my father’s manse on Nantucket, back to my old fantasies. But the face which floated into my first dream was a new face. A girl with golden hair and cool gray eyes. The face of Enoch’s daughter—Barbara.

  XII

  “He’s not a heretic. He’s an unbeliever,” Judith insisted, facing the Settlement Council. “That’s quite different. A heretic believes the wrong thing. An unbeliever doesn’t believe anything!”

  Chairman Yackle looked nonplused, the other Councilors confused. We had been in Sutton Cove for a week and Yackle had suggested that I, as a heretic, could not be allowed to stay much longer. Judith had countered with a theological argument. But the Council were not interested in theology; they were only interested in avoiding discord. They had created a snug haven for themselves and their children in a world where the storms were rising and the number of children was falling. I was an intruder, a source of disruptive ideas who had arrived with two guns and a murky background.

  “If you want to keep me, then you’ve got to take my husband!” Judith fell back from theological argument to open threat.

  I sat up, opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. For Judith the fact of marriage seemed derived from the act of love; our consummation in the hay had established our married state to her satisfaction, and I was in no position to deny it. Later, perhaps, I could claim annulment.

  The Councilors went in a huddle. They didn’t want me but they did want her. Enoch took the pipe from his mouth and remarked, “Mister Gavin’s a good electronics tech. He fixed my radar.”

  “We need an electronics man,” added Jehu, another elderly fisherman with a taste for rum. “Old Shipley don’t see so well now, and young Rustin ain’t learned enough yet.”

  Yackle got the message. “I did not realize that you and 149

  Mister Gavin were married, Doctor. That, of course, altera the situation. We would offend the Light were we to be responsible for putting asunder two people who are joined in matrimony.” He looked around the table. “Perhaps we can employ Mister Gavin on a temporary basis. Providing he does not parade his unbelief before our children.”

  “I’ve learned never to parade my views on politics or religion.”

  Yackle rubbed his hands together. “Good! Good! I am confident that you will become Brother Gavin after you have lived among us for a while.” The same hope that Anslinger had expressed. “That the Light will illuminate you as it illuminates us.”

  I could match him pietism for pietism. “The Light is the true Light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world.” However doubtful the validity of the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John, the King James translation is among the glories of the English language.

  The fact that only Yackle, Enoch, and Judith seemed to recognize the source of the quotation told me a good deal about the general education of the Sutton Settlement Believers. After the Council had accepted me as a temporary stranger within their gates and we were outside on the steps of the Hall, Judith snapped, “For an agnostic gunman, you’re a fast man with a pious phrase!”

  “My father was a Presbyterian minister and force fed me the Bible. I can quote scripture to suit any occasion!”

  “Your father a minister—and he let you join the Army?” “Dad said at seventeen I should make up my own mind. So when he sent me off to college I took Gramps’ advice and went to the SSF for my education.”

  “You jumped from one authority to another.”

  I swung on her, suddenly furious. “What the hell do you mean?”

  She faced me. “You’ve made a career of being a faithful follower. You’re feudal. A samurai always looking for a Lord. Your father—your grandfather—Colonel Jewett—Arnold Grainer. And whoever told you to kill Futrell. In the Pen you were adrift—”

  “Until you took over, I suppose!”

  She shrugged. “You needed a push. Remember? At Sherando you latched onto Anslinger—”

  “Judy, you’re no psychologist! So lay off analyzing me.”

  “I’m only trying to tell you that here you’ll have to be your own man.”

  “A few minutes back I found I’d been married without being asked 1”

  “Well? Do you want to split?”

  I looked into her green eyes. “Do you?”

  “No!” She stared back, defiant.

  “Then I’m still a masterless man! But I’ve got a damned pretty mistress!” I grabbed her and kissed her long and hard, despite her initial protests and the embarrassment of Chuck Yackle, who emerged from the Council Chamber just as Judy was starting to respond.

  Enoch had told me the story of the Sutton Cove Settlement when we had sat drinking in his boat. It had been founded by a group of Believers some twenty years before after they had heard their Teacher advise them to pick some remote place and start living the simple life. A slightly bemused look had come over Enoch’s face, and I had again been astonished at the effect the man had had on so many diverse people. Enoch, for example, was a jovial, good-hearted, and pragmatic person, yet a word from the Teacher had been enough for him and his wife to uproot themselves and move into this deserted fishing village to start a new life.

  He had been one of the few fishermen among the original group of Believers; in fact one of the few displaced Fundy fishermen who returned to inshore fishing. But he would have gone to establish a Settlement in the middle of Texas if the Teacher had told him. The group had picked Sutton Cove principally because the land and buildings had cost them almost nothing, and it was as remote as anywhere on the eastern seaboard.

  Much of the Maine coast and the whole coastline of the Bay of Fundy had been desolated in 1990 when the Joseph Kinross loaded with crude for the refinery at Pocolagon, had collided with the chemical carrier Jenny Wren, outward bound from Eastport with a cargo of tritorridine. They had run into each other at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy in a typical radar-assisted collision; the category of maritime disasters which i
ncluded those in which watch-offlcers had preferred to watch a radar screen in a warm wheelhouse than look over a dodger on a cold bridge. A collision of two aging monsters manned by incompetents and officered by fools. In 1990, despite high pay and luxurious accommodation, it had already become difficult to persuade sensible seamen to ship out in single-bottomed, single-boilered, single-screwed behemoths, rescued from the scrap yard by anonymous owners and chartered through Caribbean-based agents.

  The Jenny Wren had been the prototype for a class of chemical carriers, a class which in a few years acquired a reputation which made them almost uninsurable. She had been cut in two and her bows had gone straight to the bottom. Her stem had lingered long enough for the whole crew to get away in the boats; the sea had been as calm as Fundy ever gets and the visibility good.

  The Joseph Kinross, listing to port, had continued to sail northeast, trailing crude from her ripped tanks. She had been abandoned as quickly as the Jenny Wren. The only engineer on watch at the time of the collision had been her dedicated engine-room computer. (Since the late nineteen-sixties human engineers on supertankers had kept office hours.) It had manfully tried to maintain the last-ordered speed despite the list and the gashed hull. When the engine room flooded, the computer had drowned. The more rugged fuel-pumps had continued to fuel the furnaces, even after the boiler feed-pumps had burned out their bearings. So the boiler had blown up, tearing a section out of her bottom.

  That had stopped her engines but the momentum of one of the largest man-made masses ever to put to sea had carried her on for another fifteen kilometers. Then the spring tides, roaring up the Bay of Fundy, had taken over and swept her level with Saint John where she had hung for half an hour before sinking.

  The Joseph Kinross had been over a kilometer from stem to stem and rated at a million metric tons. By the time she sank she had discharged half a billion liters of crude onto the Bay of Fundy, with the result that the waters of the Bay had been less troubled during the subsequent spring gales than ever before in history. During the next few months, as her remaining half billion liters came welling up, the Fundy tides and the Fundy winds had laid a black strip of crude oil between high and low watermarks from Portland to Brier Island.

  This was a disaster that marine experts had been predicting for years. The Governments of Canada and the United States reacted as though it were an unexpected Act of God. The disappearance of the anonymous owners and the bankruptcy of the charter parties left a financial hiatus which delayed action, and by the time action was taken there was no effective action to take. Both governments finally announced that, given time, the coast would recover its unsoiled condition. Then the seepage from the Jenny Wren began to take effect.

  TTD, tritorridine, is an innocuous compound used in the synthesis of neoplasties. Under sufficient pressure, howfever, it reacts with free chloride ions to produce ritidine chloride, toxic to most organisms. At a depth of three hundred meters the ocean provided both chloride ions and pressure. As TTD seeped out, ritidine was formed, currents and tides distributed it and killed off what marine life had survived the oil. Within a year the Bay of Fundy was a dead sea, and over its whole coast hung the stench of death.

  By then the entire population of the littoral had been evacuated. Both the US and the Canadian Governments compensated its dispossessed citizens by buying them out. The Canadians, with rare bureaucratic humor, declared the devastated strip of coast to be a wildlife sanctuary. The US Government, more realistic (or with a more subtle wit) gave theirs to the military. The oil-soaked, death-strewn beaches provided a training area which (apart from the cold) simulated conditions troops were likely to meet going ashore when the Persian Gulf again went critical.

  Once the need for amphibious training was past, the deserted coast had become a proving-ground for bombs, shells, and guided missiles, with Jona’s Point as a prime target. The peninsula and its hinterland had been bombarded by high-explosive, antipersonnel spreaders, napalmite, smokes, defoliants, and God knows what else. The fuse-failure rate was low, but even at one percent the number of unexploded missiles with various contents scattered through woods, beaches, and inshore shallows accumulated until the Point was among the most heavily mined areas in the world. The ideal site for both the new Federal Penitentiary and the prototype fusion reactor.

  By then TTD has ceased to seep from the Jenny Wren, the sea had given up its dead, and the lower forms of marine life had started to thrive on the rich organic remains of the original inhabitants. The cod, the pollack, the herring, the hake, and the halibut followed to gorge once more on the biota the Fundy tides swept over the ledges, and lobsters crawled slowly back up the coast to their cold feeding grounds. The only major species made extinct by the combination of oil and TTD was the Fundy Inshore Fisherman.

  Inshore fishing is a hard way to earn a living. It requires a mastery of many skills, including an intimate knowledge of where, when, and how. By the time the fish returned the fishermen who knew had gone and nobody was interested in relearning. During the Affluence only the rich went to sea in small boats and bad weather, only die rich enjoyed cold, wet, and exhaustion as they raced sailboats, each of which cost more than the whole fleet which had once fished from Sutton Cove.

  The Believers had moved in to fill the ecological niche left vacant by the extinction of the local fishermen. The original founders had been devout, enthusiastic, and educated but all they had known about commercial fishing was what young Enoch and two old fishermen had been able to tell them, and what they had read in books. Their first catches had been pitifully small, but as they learned about the sea and developed their own fishing techniques, the Settlement had grown and prospered.

  The Believers were simpleminded in their religion but not in their thinking. The technological constraints of their creed had made them apply “elegant engineering” to small-boat fishing. Offshore the great factory ships steamed over the Grand Banks, their fish-pumps sucking up everything that swam, converting live fish to canned, frozen or powdered forms, untouched by human hands. But they could not invade the rocky inshore grounds where the underwater ledges would smash their pump intakes and rip their hulls. Yet it was along those ledges that the rich feeding grounds lay; waters that could only be harvested by hand-line and trawl.

  The original Believers had been a mixed lot and, like my companions in the Pen, had had a variety of skills. After twenty years of learning the waters the fleet out of Sutton Cove was bringing in catches as large as those of the sixteenth century when fishermen from Britain, France, and Portugal first discovered the richest fishing grounds in the world.

  At the time of the Settlement’s founding the locals had looked upon Believers as I had done at first; a group of religious nuts trying to live a simple life of semiproverty while the rest of America was riding the Affluence. That patronizing but friendly attitude had started to fade as the Settlement had advanced from rural poverty to quiet prosperity. Now many of the locals were starting to talk of the Believers as a bunch of foreigners who had moved in to steal their lobsters, although there was not a local left who knew how to bait a trap.

  During the first few years the people of Sutton Settlement had lived on what they had caught and sold what they didn’t eat as cattle feed and fertilizer. By 2010 Fundy waters were declared clear and its products approved for export to foreigners. In 2015 its fish and lobsters were found fit for consumption by Americans and the Settlement gained a ready market for all it could catch. Fresh fish was at a premium; in the judgment of epicures, free-ranging lobsters from the cold waters of Maine tasted far better than the tanked product. Sutton Settlement was one of the few sources. The Settlement had brought prosperity and population back to Standish, though nobody-except Believers dared live any closer than thirty kilometers to the coast. The lethal reputation of the Fundy shoreline persisted as a legend more powerful that the facts about Impermease.

  I settled down well enough into this seafaring society and earned my keep as the resident
electronics tech. The Settlement had been suffering from the usual complaint of organizations which purchase sophisticated equipment without ensuring there shall be adequate service backup. I had all the work I could handle overhauling the gear in the boats, the com system in the Cove, and the radio station, which kept the Settlement in touch with other Settlements all over the world.

  It was officially a ham radio station, but the transmitter was a good deal simpler than most twenty-first-century ham stations. For one thing it was strictly code in an age when few hams bothered to learn the International Morse Code and even commercial operators couldn’t handle code at any speed. The kids who manned the Sutton station passed traffic at over thirty words a minute, and could have matched keys with the expert radio operators of a century before.

  The station intrigued me more than the sophisticated mi-crocircuitry in the boats, and I came to enjoy sitting in the radio shack watching some youngster copying signals so faint that I could hardly hear them through the interference and static.

  When I asked Kitty, one of the more talkative operators, why they made life difficult for themselves in this way, she explained, “Here in North America we can get almost any kind of electronic gadget we want—at present. But a lot of the Settlements are away to hell and gone. They may have to keep going for years with the gear they’ve got now. They may be powering their transmitters from somebody peddling a bicycle-generator. That means we’ve got to get used to CW only—morse code. And we’ve got to learn to read signals through heavy QRM and QRN—interference and noise.” She broke off our conversation to swivel around in her chair and fine-tune her receiver. These kids seemed to be able to carry on a discussion with one ear and monitor a channel with the other. “Some Aussie calling. At this time of day the Aussies come rolling in on fourteen megahertz. Could be a genuine ham.” She checked the call sign against a list. “No—it’s one of ours.” She pressed the phones against her ears, then rattled out an acknowledgment on her key. She listened a moment, touched her key again, and made an entry in the log. “Near Wiluna, Western Australia. Out in a damned great desert, Routine report that all’s as well as can be expected.”