XVII
we nestled on the bottom, a mile off shore, and waited. Waited for what? Not for some miracle to put fuel in our tanks, for there was no hope of that; not for someone to rescue us, for the U.N. would never come near Madagascar and the Caodais would not rescue but kill. Not even for the world to come to an end. For that had already begun. We just waited.
Semyon was comforting the animals; Elsie and Nina were sitting inspecting each other in silence. We had taken a prisoner, old Nguyen himself, and he was bound where once we had bound the late pacifist, Winnington. Too bad he was dead, I told myself, he would have been delighted with the way things were working out. Because the pacifist dream, the war to bring peace by destroying all warriors, was already well begun.
Nguyen said heavily from his corner, "Incredible." He was staring reflectively at Semyon and the dogs. "They are your animals; you use them as slaves. Some you kill and eat, do you not? The Caodai does not eat flesh, that seems horrible to us. And yet—they love you."
Semyon patted Josie. "We love them!" he said defiantly. Nguyen shrugged.
"It is well known," he said, "that you love everyone and everything. It accounts for the satellite bombings as easily as for your slaughterhouses."
"Shut up, old man!" said Semyon. He crooned to the dogs, while Elsie flared up:
"Put a gag in his mouth. I'm sick of Caodai hypocrisy. The Western atheists do this and the Western atheists do that, and there we are moldering away in their prison camps, while they pretend that the fault's all ours. Gag him! Or I'll shut him up myself."
I looked in some amazement at my warrior bride.
For I remembered Elsie. She was a quiet and biddable girl when we married—not counting her habit of volunteering, of course. I'd never heard her shout at anyone—not at anyone at all, not even me. True, Nguyen was the arch-enemy, and she must have had pitiful fantasies of a chance like this while she was in the concentration camp. But—even so.
Not the least of the problems of the big cold war, I thought, would come when the Elsies and the Mes tried to get back to where we could recognize each other again.
Nina Willette was collecting herself again. She was an intelligence officer, and she too had no doubt had ridiculous dreams of a chance like this. "Now then!" she said briskly to the pope of the Caodai. "Tell me what you were doing here."
He looked at her calmly. "I ask you to tell me," she wheedled. "Please. There is no use to keep a secret, is there?" She offered him a cigarette and smiled, woman-to-man.
"An admirable performance," commented Nguyen. "I do not smoke, but your interrogation is splendid."
"Thank you. Why did you leave Cambodia for this lousy little island?" He shrugged. Nina smiled again. "Good," she said. "You stick to your principles. I don't suppose any of us will last twenty-four more hours, but we might as well go on with it, just as if it mattered whether you gave up information, or I obtained it. So I shall continue to ask questions, and you will answer only where it doesn't matter. Correct?"
Nguyen said heavily, "Correct."
Semyon cut in, '"You could at least tell us what is happening, old man. There is no secret about that."
Nguyen closed his eyes, "The end of the world is happening. Your ship attacked us in our own waters. We retaliated. Your people retaliated against our retaliation—"
"The satellite bombs?"
"You have seen one of them," said Nguyen-Yat-Hugo. "You must realize that our bombs are falling too."
Nina whimpered, "But why? You must have known it was the end for all of us!"
Semyon raged: "Couldn't you wait, old man? Your weapon was too slow, was it? The burning and killing did not satisfy you, you must unleash the satellite bombs—"
Nguyen said hoarsely, "A moment. Our weapon? What weapon is that?"
"I do not know your name for it," Semyon said in contemptuous tones. "We call it the Glotch; it is a burning fire that strikes the head and neck and—"
He trailed off. The stern, stiff old face of Nguyen was cracking. "No," said Nguyen, shaking his head.
It was incredible, but you couldn't doubt the expression on his face. I stammered, "It—it isn't your weapon?"
"It is not," said Nguyen with passion. "The Caodai is on its knees beneath it!"
We stared at each other. If it wasn't a Caodai weapon and Elsie confirmed that it had struck the Caodais as hard as us—and if it wasn't our own weapon, which it was not—
Whose weapon was it?
"Too late, too late!" whispered Nguyen, looking through our periscopic sights. We had surfaced, and the smoking coast of Madagascar was a mile or less away.
"Maybe the damage is only local," I said. "Can you raise anyone on the radio, Nina?"
She shook her head. "Everybody's jamming," she said briefly.
"Fall-out negligible," Semyon reported from the aft lookout ports. "There must have been an offshore wind. One should not swim too long in these waters, though."
I said to the pope of the Caodai: "If we find a spot on the coast where we can safely land, can you conduct us to a place where we can radio the U.N. forces?"
He spread his hands, his face a mask. "I can try."
"We haven't any other choice, Logan," Elsie reminded me. I noticed that her hand was in mine. Even if we could refuel this boat, we could scarcely navigate it back across the Atlantic."
"Man your stations," I ordered. "Nguyen, I assume you haven't any hailing signal we could use for a safe-conduct? It would be a help, if a Caodai ship should spot us—" He shook his head.
"Full speed south then," I said. "As long as the fuel holds out."
It held out better than I had expected; we made nearly ten miles before the engines began to splutter. While we still had steerage way I spun the rudder wheel, and we slanted in on a sandy beach. There were concrete pillboxes and chevaux-de-frise, and God knows how many electronic and sonar alarms we triggered as we beached. But there apparently were very few Caodais at the filter centers that day, after the bombs had fallen. Our only real danger—from that particular source, at least—was that someone would notice we had landed on a radar remote, and send over a nike to home in on us to save the trouble of investigating.
We ran away from the beach, as far as we could get before our breath ran out, in case a wandering patrol should happen by.
"There is," said the pope, "a command post somewhere about. I consecrated it myself, two days ago."
We sent one of the monkeys up a tree, but she either couldn't understand what we wanted, or her short simian vision didn't let her detect the building we had described. Semyon, cursing in Russian, tried climbing it himself. But we couldn't get high enough to see, any of us.
"It is this way," said Nguyen strongly, and what could we do but follow his lead?
And he led us right into a trap.
There were Caodais all over the place. They swarmed from the command post like termites from a hill; there was a rattle of small arms fire, and rushing brown-skinned men in uniforms, and it was all over before we could move. For a moment when they jumped us I had old Nguyen in front of my gun, and I don't know why I didn't pull the trigger. "Treacherous beast," sobbed Semyon, "we trusted you and you betrayed us!" And I felt much the same.
"No!" cried Nguyen, and he bellowed something at the Caodai soldiers. They gave him an argument. Apparently he wasn't recognized; but they took us all to the command post, and there was a long, complicated discussion in French too fast for my ears. Nina, following it as closely as she could, explained:
"They don't know him. They think he's an impostor, and the fat one is all for shooting the lot of us. Now somebody's going to get a picture, and then—"
They brought the picture—a ceremonial portrait draped in yellow bunting, as remote a likeness to the real man in its own prettifying way as the caricatures in our latrines had been in theirs.
But it convinced them; and that was that. So all we had to do was arrange to use their radio, get in touch with the U.N. command in Washington, stop the war and clear up the mess.
It was a tough assignment. All the more because we never got past Step One. Jamming loud and furious-jamming by the Caodais and jamming by us. There were no radio communications anywhere, period.