Edward Llewellyn

by Prelude to Chaos

  I turned to look up the village street. The lights had been left burning in most of the houses, so the Settlement glowed in the mist as though it was still alive. But it was dead, and its people were out on the Bay. Driven out to become refugees in their own country. I shouted curses into the fog, curses at the tanks coming to destroy the remnants of a civilization. A world ending not with a bang but a snarl.

  Enoch touched my arm. “Reckon we’d best be moving.

  Those soldier-boys will be crossing the creek soon. And they’ll come ashooting.”

  “One last thing!” 1 wheeled my Slada to the end of the jetty, headed it toward the sea, started the motor, kicked it into gear, and let it go. Its roar died with the splash. None of those bastards up the road were going to ride my bike.

  Later on I heard that Judith had done the same to her Yama.

  The Council were sitting at the table and some fifty other people were crammed standing in Ranula's saloon. Among them were Barbara and Midge. Even the juniors were being brought into the act. I looked for Judith and saw her in a comer with Jehu. She waved at me to join her but it was impossible to squeeze between bulky windbreakers and I stood with Enoch by the door. I was only there because Yackle had radioed for me to come; I couldn’t give much advice now we were at sea. Every fisherman around me knew more about boats and the bay than I did.

  They were discussing where to go; arguing out a last-minute decision which should have been firm months earlier. That seemed to be the usual way Believers reached decisions; despite my training I was beginning to see some sense in it. They prepared for a number of possibilities so they had a plan ready for whatever turned up. Something like dynamnic programming in computers. But unnerving to me, who had been taught to plan ahead, check the logic, and act crisply.

  They were all agreed that the only place Ranula could go safely, at least for the night, was Fairhaven. The argument was now centering on whether everybody should go there with her, or whether some of the boats should set out at once along the coast in search of a more attractive home. We lay, lifting and falling in the slight swell, the fog thick around us, while Chuck Yackle used Roberts’ Rules of Order to chair a debate which was mostly wistful thinking. I wanted to escape to Aurora and consume some of Enoch’s rum, but when I tried to slip away he caught my arm and muttered, “We’ll be needing you in a moment, Mister Gavin.”

  “What for? I can’t add anything to this.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He took advantage of a halt in the debate to call, “Chairman Yackle—my little girl has an idea that’s not half bad.”

  “Barbara? Where is she?” Yackle peered round the crowded saloon. “Oh, there you are. Well, young lady, what idea do you have? Don’t be shy—we need all the ideas we can get.”

  Telling Barbara not to be shy was rather like telling a Trooper not to be modest. Yackle knew that as well as I did; I sensed another of those prearranged proposals which seemed the Chairman’s usual method of obtaining what he wanted from his colleagues.

  She pushed her way through the crowd to stand at the end of the saloon table; shyness was the least appropriate term to describe her stance and expression. Like most of the other men and women there she had belted on a revolver and she stood with her feet apart against Ranula’s gentle roll, her hand on the butt of her pistol. I remembered a line from Chesterton: “Barbara of the gunners, with her hand upon the gun.” Saint Barbara, the patron saint of artillery and those in danger of sudden death. The girl facing us was no saint in any sense. But she might one day figure in the legends of her religion.

  “These are our alternatives. We can go to Fairhaven, pray to be left alone, and rot if we are. We can go along the coast, try to slip in some place, and be captured all together. Or we can split up, every boat for herself. Most boats will be captured or sunk when this fog clears and the choppers come after us. Some might escape. But separated—we’re nothing!” She made a gesture of disgust.

  “So what’s your idea, girl?” asked an oldster who had obviously disapproved of Yackle’s calling on a junior to speak.

  “To try for the only place within range where we’ll have a chance to stand off those cabron until their whole rotten system falls apart.” Her words made me realize that Barbara and Anslinger had something in common. “Jona’s Point.”

  “Jona’s Point? Where the Pen is?”

  “Where the Pen was. It’s a Federal supply dump now.”

  Everybody started to talk at once, with the oldster piping up that the child was crazy. Yackle gaveled the meeting to silence. “The Federal Penitentiary is guarded by sophisticated radar and those deadly particle beams. We’ve been warned often enough not to let any boat stray within ten kilometers of it.”

  “We haven’t been warned lately, because it isn’t any more. A boat can go right up to the wharf. The Howard does it twice a week.”

  “But the John Howard’s a specially equipped ship. She’s—”

  “She’s gat nothing the Sea Eagle hasn’t got. And I’ve been alongside that wharf.” She glanced across the saloon. “Judith and Mister Gavin were with me. Isn’t that right, Mister Gavin?”

  Everybody was suddenly looking at me. “We slipped in one night to take a look-see,” I admitted.

  “And what did you see?” asked Yackle.

  Barbara answered before I could. “Ten half-assed guards. All sleeping, fooling around, or screwing. In this fog we could run right in and be on them before they know what’s hit. Like the other Feds tried to hit us.”

  “But their beams! Their radar!”

  “Barbara’s right. There aren’t any defenses operational,” I said. “And the main entrance was open when we visited. They had crates all over the wharf and up the tunnel.” I paused. “Of course, that was months ago. Things may have changed since then.”

  “Things may have changed,” said Gertrude, “but one thing hasn’t. Jona’s Point is Federal property—whether they’re using it as a prison or a warehouse. And if we invade Federal property we’ll bring down a Strike Force on us. That’s the last thing we need. We are trying to escape notice, not push ourselves out into the limelight.” She paused. “I agree, the Pen would make an ideal base. But why not settle in Fairhaven for the time being, see if Jona’s Point is as easy to approach as Barbara thinks it is, and then take it over later on.”

  Barbara swung on her. “If we wait—somebody else will get there first. And we’re not likely to have another night when the fog’s thick and the Coast Guard’s tied up!”

  A babble of voices. Judith’s cut through them. “We are being tested! Tested by the Light! If we fail—we will be found unworthy.” Pragmatic Judith off on her mystical kick. It brought silence to the saloon and they made way for her when she moved to the table. “Think!” she commanded us. “A calm sea, a thick fog, a moonless night. Gavin’s radar spoiler. Barbara’s trawl around the cutter’s screws. The lead tank in the creek. The overhang across the road. The children safe aboard this ship. All of us gathered here in this saloon. Do you think all these are coincidences?” She dismissed such an absurdity with a shake of her head, her hair glinting auburn and gold. “The Light has given us the means. We must find the way.”

  Logically and theologically that was absurd. Persuasively, it was effective. Even I was trapped. Yackle broke the silence. “I take it, Doctor, that you favor an attempt to capture Jona’s Point now?”

  “That is our challenge!” She looked round as if to see if any of us rejected it. For the moment she was not my wife; she was a prophetess, a priestess, a Wise Woman. Or a Valkyrie, choosing those who were to be slain. I shifted uneasily, and was startled when she dropped into her normal voice. “With ten boats and fifty rifles we’d have a chance of capturing the Pen, wouldn’t we, Gavin?”

  I licked my lips. “If the guard hasn’t been beefed up.” Her eyes started to flash, and I added, “Even if it has—we have a chance.”

  Enoch, beside me, spoke up. “That girl of mine, she’s young and her manners
ain’t so good, but her thinking’s not bad. Except she hasn’t thought things through as she’ll leam when she’s a mite older! I reckon there’s fifty of us willing to take a chance, but there’s no call to risk the rest. I propose that we make up what Mister Gavin here would say was a ‘hit team’ and try for the Pen. The rest go with this ship and the young kids to Fairhaven and wait there. If we make it we can signal ’em to come across. If we don’t—” He shrugged. “They’ll be no worse off. Neither, in the end, will we. The Light expects us to try. It knows we’re not always going to win.” He put his empty pipe back into his mouth.

  Some of this had been orchestrated; some of it had not. From the way that Yackle put his fingertips together I sensed that Enoch had brought the meeting back to the prearranged program. There was a general chorus of approval in the saloon, with Gertrude loudly insisting that if the attack on the Pen failed, the raiding party must dissociate itself completely from the Settlement to avoid bringing Federal retribution down on the Believers waiting in Fairhaven.

  XIII

  The fog shrouded us, wet and thick. In the wheelhouse of Aurora I could see no farther than the for’rd hatch. Enoch was concentrating on the radar screen and the cluster of bright blips which marked the positions of the other four boats.

  The sun was setting somewhere in the west but only the lighter obscurity to port showed that a sun existed. I had been warned about these Fundy fogs, and soon after my arrival in Sutton Cove I had learned their reality. Sculling a dory from the wharf to a boat anchored only a hundred meters across the cove I had not bothered to take a compass. I had lost sight of the wharf after three strokes with the scull, and only regained it an hour later when I ran into the end of the jetty. I had never found the boat whose radar I was supposed to be fixing. That day I had cursed the Fundy fog and my own foolishness in equal measure. Watching the fogbank roll over us as we headed north I thanked the Light—or whoever was responsible—for sending it.

  We were moving at ten knots toward Jona’s Point, now clear at the top of the radar screen. The echosounder ticked off confirmation of our position as it read the depth of the water and the profile of the seabed beneath us. Astern the radar showed Ranula and the rest of the fleet heading toward Fairhaven. To port the Coast Guard cutter was drifting helplessly while her divers were struggling to free a thousand meters of chronon line from her screws. At the rate the tide and current were taking her northeast she was likely to ground before her props were free. We had listened to Lieutenant Jenson’s radio calls for aid; calls that had gone unanswered. There was no other Coast Guard cutter within two hundred kilometers; there were probably none still operational north of Boston. Nobody was moving to help the unfortunate Lieutenant or to intercept us. If indeed anybody knew where we had gone.

  My spoiler was aboard Barbara’s boat just ahead, and working well. Any standard radar more than a few kilometers away would show us as a localized rainstorm. Unless the operator was familiar with Fundy weather, he or she was unlikely to wonder how a localized rainstorm could be moving north on an evening when the sea was calm and the fog thick.

  I watched Jona’s Point creeping down the screen. The whiteness around us faded through gray to black as the day waned. Ahead was the Pen; the place I must capture with five boats and forty rifles. When the Couneil had accepted Enoch’s suggestion of a “hit team,” a term more appropriate to gangsters than Believers, it had also accepted Yackle’s proposal that I lead it My protests had been brushed aside. I wasn’t a sailor or a Believer, but the Council knew that I had once been a member of the Special Strike Force; an organization of which it disapproved but for whose efficiency it had an exaggerated respect. I had been a Trooper; therefore I knew how to conduct a seaborne raid. Nobody else did, so I must be the leader sent by the Light for that specific purpose.

  During the next hour I discovered that Enoch and his friends had prepared more than a proposal; they had a plan already in operation. The raiding flotilla, five boats which included Enoch’s Aurora and Barbara’s Sea Eagle, were lying alongside Ratiula. The volunteer rifles, ten women and thirty men, were going aboard. Barbara, as the only helmsman who had actually taken a boat into the Point would lead the flotilla. I would be with Enoch in the command vessel. Everything was planned up to the time when the boats put us ashore. Thereafter I would direct the action. Barbara had told them I knew the inside of the Pen; nobody had asked where and how I had gained that knowledge.

  I had had command thrust upon me and, unable to avoid it, I was beginning to feel easier in it What we were attempting might be crazy, but I knew what I was doing and how to do it—if it could be done at all. It was the kind of thing I had done too often in the past. But this time, for the first time, I knew it was worth doing.

  “Should be hearing the foghorn at Jona’s soon,” I said to Enoch.

  He shook his head, his eyes still on the radar screen. "She don’t blow no more, Mister Gavin. Broke down last winter and they never fixed her.”

  Old Groaner had been allowed to die. For some reason I found that the most ominous of portents. The foghorn at Jona’s Point had been warning mariners of danger for over two centuries. Its silence prophesied the chaos to come more clearly than any statistic.

  The blip marking the Point crept closer and when we were about twelve kilometers south of where the wharf should be I called the other four boats. “This is a last check. At ten clicks we’ll be within com range of the Pen. Anybody ahead who’s listening will know we’re here, even if they don’t understand what we’re saying. So after you’ve reported only use the com in an emergency.”

  Martha, Jehu, Adam, and Barbara reported in turn that they understood. Then I made my own modification to their plan. “I’m shifting to Sea Eagle, so I’ll be first on the wharf. After Barbara’s put me ashore all boats hang off until I call you in, boat by boat.”

  “Mister Gavin—” Barbara started to protest.

  “I’ll be coming over Enoch’s bows.” I cut my com and looked at him. “Can you nose up to Sea Eagle's stem?”

  “If you say so!” He looked up from the radar and smiled at me. “Go for’rd and call back when I’m touching.”

  I gripped his shoulder, eased past the men and women crowding the wheelhouse, and groped my way along the fore-deck toward the bows. For minutes I was alone in palpable darkness—the fog pressing in like a wet wrapping. Then, suddenly, the stern light of the Sea Eagle was directly beneath me and I called back for Enoch to ease off. He and his daughter must have been in telepathic communication for Aurora’s stem only nudged her boat. I jumped down onto the afterdeck as Enoch dropped back into the fog. Somebody grabbed me. “Welcome aboard!” It was Judith.

  “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to be with the kids in Ranula."

  “I’m more use here. I know the Pen too!” She led me for’rd. “If you get hit I’ll be able to take over guidance.” She stopped at the wheelhouse door. “Please—give me your Jeta. In case I have to shoot somebody!”

  Judith was like all the rest. Act first—ask afterwards. I gave her the dart-gun and went into the wheelhouse to join Midge, Sam, and Barbara. Midge welcomed me, Barbara ignored me, and Sam grinned.

  I moved beside Barbara at the wheel. “Got a fix?”

  She nodded. “We’re five clicks southwest of the Point. I’m about to change course and run up to the channel marker.”

  We stood silent, the night and the fog heavy around us. The only sounds were the low rumble of the turbine and the slap of the waves on our forefoot. The radar showed the other boats taking up line astern. I stared into the murk. Presently Midge said, “The Pen’s over there.”

  I could see nothing until I used the night-sights of my Luger and picked out the silhouette of our target. Barbara called softly, “We’re at the channel buoy. Shall I go on in?” “Can you see where to go?”

  “Sonic rangefinder’s bouncing well. There’s the wharf!” She pointed to the tube and though I couldn’t tell what the ul-tr
acoustic beeps were bouncing from, she seemed confident it was the metal pilings of the pier.

  “Ease in then. Put me off on a ladder. Tide’s about half, so I’ll have three meters to climb. Then stand away until I signal all clear. Got that?”

  She nodded, reluctantly. Either she or Judith had planned to be the first over the top. I was discovering that once women start down the glory road they follow it as blindly as men. But if I was leading tins expedition I was damned well going to lead; if somebody was to be shot at first, it was going to be me.

  “Better get ready to jump, Mister Gavin,” whispered Midge. These girls seemed able to see in the dark. I was reaching out and actually touched the dockside with my hand before I knew we had arrived.

  “Ladder’s back here!” hissed Judith, catching my arm and urging me aft. I grabbed seaweed, then wet metal rungs. “Good luck!”

  I went up the ladder in three bounds; over the top and flat on the wharf in the best assault manner. I hugged the perma-crete, trying not to breathe. Silence and darkness; the fog both muffled and hid. I heard nothing from Sea Eagle which should be easing away from the wharf. I estimated the direction of the tunnel and started to crawl toward it. After about two meters I rammed my raised face into the side of a container.

  I rubbed my skinned forehead and hoped that my nose wasn’t bleeding, felt for the edge of the container, crawled round it, and ran into another. The whole wharf was covered with the damned things. By a process of trial and error, the strategy of a dumb automaton, I found a gap between them and at least saw a dim light. The tunnel was still lit. I crawled to the entrance and found both gates blocked open. They’d been offloading containers onto the wharf and just shoving them up the tunnel.

  There was no sound or sign of life from the inspection station or beyond. I felt my way back to the wharf, saved myself from falling over the edge, and gave a quick call on my com. “Wharf all clear. First boat, come in!”