Long Voyage Back by Luke Rhinehart Read Free Book Online Page B

island.
    Some of the locals came up as the boat approached the dock and took the two mooring lines. A skinny little man was at the wheel and a young kid put out the fenders. When the launch was secured, the little man came out of the wheelhouse, puffing on a pipe. After Frank had walked back to where he had set his dufflebags and then transferred himself and his stuff on to the ferry, the captain helped a woman he apparently knew to climb on board.
    `You folks heah about the woah?' he asked her and the two men with her.
    'What war is that, Cap?' one of the men boarding asked in return. Ì don't know as whether they've-named it yet,' he answered, a quizzical frown on his round face. 'But it's another one of our woahs.'
    `What do you mean?' the woman asked nervously, seating herself next to Frank on a middle bench.
    `My radio says theahs going to be a woah. With the Russians.'
    Òh, that,' said Frank, feeling the tension that the captain's vague statements had created beginning to lessen.
    "When'd you hear this?' another man asked.
    `Five minutes ago, I'd guess,' the captain said. 'Made it seem pretty important. National emergency or something. Like an air raid wahning.'
    Àir raid warning for where?' Frank asked irritably. `Well, I guess for just about the whole country,' the little man replied.
    `What are you going to do about it, Cap?' the first man asked.
    `Not much I can do till I finish this last ferry trip,' he said, motioning to the young kid to free the mooring lines.
    `Has anyone been killed yet?' the woman asked.
    `Not that they mentioned,' the captain replied as he went through to the wheelhouse. He turned back to them halfway to the wheel. 'They just kep' saying emergency,' he concluded.
    The forty-five foot ferry swung out of the dock area and began its hour and a half trip through the darkness to Tangier. Frank leaned back on the bench, hugging his right knee for balance, and sensed the anxiety rising within him. It was one thing to have a war scare but quite another to declare some sort of national emergency so that people began telling their neighbours there was a war.
    He stared unseeingly off to his right and began to consider the effect an escalation of the panic might have on his business fortunes when something caught his attention. There was a strange increasing glow across the bay like the lights of a huge city being slowly turned on. It didn't seem to him to be a fire; the light was too diffuse, too much just a glow. Unless it were a long way off.
    `What's that?' the woman next to him asked the man on her other side. Along with the seven or eight other passengers Frank watched in fascination as the light, like the slowly rising head of a deadly cobra, gradually rose with increasing intensity. He felt a stab of horror and stood up.
    `Looks like a fire,' someone said.
    Frank pushed past the knees of the two people next to him and strode forward to the wheelhouse.
    `What's our heading?' he asked the little captain in the dimly lit wheelhouse.
    `Heading?' the little man asked, squinting up at him.
    Frank looked at the compass binnacle lit with a soft reddish light. Their course was southwest. The glow then was to the northwest, perhaps a little north of northwest. He tried to visualize the map of the Chesapeake which he'd been studying the day before, then looked back at the spreading and intensifying glow.
    Washington. There were no cities along the Chesapeake northwest of Crisfield. The first city northwest of Crisfield was way inland - Washington. A hundred miles away. A hundred miles away. Holy Sweet Jesus. The light glowed more brightly. Frank staggered out of the wheelhouse.
    Captain Oily was dozing in his faded and worn overstuffed chair, the television set gleaming in front of him, the sound turned down low, though still audible. Hours before, his son had gone out to a Smith Island bar, but 0lly had decided to stay home, bushed as usual.
    The face of a newscaster on the screen was intoning in tense,