Prelude

He awakens in a swirling gray mist. They are on the floor, where she collapsed, and he is holding onto her. There is fog and the sound of the ocean, and possibly a bell.

They seem to be on a pier, because he can distinctly hear the water slapping against the pilings. He can’t seem to get a fix on direction. He wonders how they got outside.

Creatures appear in front of him, manlike. Two or three shadowy men, it looks like, but they are outfitted in what looks like rubber suits, large thick gloves and shoes, and hoods with glass where the face would be. He wonders if these are space men, like the ones in Jules Verne. One of them addresses him by name, and it is a man’s voice through a radio speaker with static. They ask how he is. One of them comes toward him with a bag, a medical kit, it appears, and he can make out a pair of concerned human eyes. He is given an injection with a gun, right through the fabric of his shirt. It pinches slightly.  A woman’s voice says it is potassium iodide for radiation. She gives his unconscious companion the same shot, shooting through the fine soiled linen of the prone woman’s blouse. The female medic pulls out another subcutaneous syringe. This is to keep you conscious, she says, and gives him the shot. What about her? he asks, indicating the sleeping woman. The medic looks and says, She’ll be all right, but you two must get out of here immediately.

Two men are at the edge of the pier, holding the lines of a small sailboat, a catboat, much smaller than his Trimethy. The man’s voice says You’re in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, do you think you can sail to Nantucket? He is confused by the request. Do you think you can sail to Nantucket? He shakes his head as if to clear it. How? In this fog with no wind? We’ll take care of that. He shakes his head again. I suppose so, he replies. They help lower his companion into the tiny boat, and help him step into it. Before they cast him off, they hand him two plastic sacks, one empty, and one with gear and tell him what to do when he gets further out.

He casts off, into the pea soup, with a helpless sense of not being oriented. Then the fog clears around the tiny vessel. He can see stars above him, and a corridor in the fog in front of him. He’s with the current, and now a tiny wind starts to lap at the rolled mainsail, so he unfurls it and trims it. He’s moving east, toward the constellation Leo, which is rising.

Now he follows the instructions. He rapidly strips all his clothes off and puts them in the empty sack. Then, naked, he crawls down under the boom and nervously starts to undress her, afraid she might wake up in the middle of this. But she doesn’t awaken. Her bare warm skin presses against his as he struggles awkwardly to remove her blouse, then her skirt. He decides this activity of undressing sleeping women is overrated. He starts to pulls her underclothing off, gingerly, and feels himself blush. He won’t think about it. Into the sack it all goes. Her head clunks dully against the bulkhead, and he starts, but she doesn’t stir. She’s still breathing, deeply.

Next he pulls out an unmarked lead paint can, which he opens with an attached key. A warm disinfectant solution of some sort. He rubs himself down with it, then leaning out over the forward pulpit rinses himself off with half the can. The cool air blasts him. He rubs himself with a towel that reeks of bleach, then crawls into the oversized clothing provided. He cinches the drawstring waist of the loose pants. He checks their course, visually.

Now he has to bathe her. The sight of her skin in the starlight halts him for a moment. She’s beautiful. He takes a breath, painfully, and starts to sponge her down. He doesn’t know how he can rinse her, but he does his best, half of her at a time, balancing her body against the sides of the boat. She never awakens. He sees the goose bumps rising on her skin, and puts her back on the burlap at the bottom of the boat and towels her off. She is shivering slightly. He’s afraid now of hypothermia. He pulls a long cotton shift over her head and down, tucking it around her. The last thing in the pack is a round red translucent bottle marked Survival Kit. He throws everything else, the towels and the can into the bag with the clothing, knots the bag, and throws it overboard. It disappears in their wake.

In the red bottle he finds, among other things, a tiny battery powered torch and compass, a nautical chart and a small packet marked Emergency Blanket. It seems impossibly thin and impossibly small, but he opens it to find a very thin wrap of a material he’s never seen before. It reminds him of the fragile beryllium films he clumsily manufactured in the lab in Cambridge.  He unfolds it and it flows over his hands. It is a large film, shiny and liquid, warm to the touch, and conducts the light like mercury. How can this protect against hypothermia? But he wraps her in it carefully, this quicksilver shroud, around her head leaving her face exposed.

He sits back, his hand on the tiller, and looks at the clear corridor of sea ahead, and Regulus, the heart of the lion, a blazing blue white first magnitude beacon. Phosphorus now appears in the water, shimmering in the wake as the craft slices through the water. He is Charon, he thinks, the ferryman, ferrying their souls across the Styx. He feels oddly calm, as if this has always been his fate, to be in this boat between two worlds, charted for a destination he knows but cannot begin to imagine.