A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “WOOOO…OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  Loren caught her and lifted her up triumphantly. She waved and shouted.

  Before long the decks of Columbia were awash with kids. Loren kept looking back over his shoulder to see what might be destroyed. Mostly all that was being destroyed were the peanut butter and crackers. Sonia looked around for an adult to send down to assist. Mr. Garner looked a bit paunchy for shooting the shoot. “I need a disciplinarian to help Loren out.”

  “That’s me, said the woman. She stepped forward with an even bigger grin than before.

  There was a chorus of shouts from the remaining children, “Melissa’s going, Melissa’s going.”

  “I’m Melissa, in case you hadn’t guessed. Melissa Blake.” She stuck out her hand.

  “Sonia.”

  Melissa shouted down to the kids below, “You guys are in big trouble now, because look who’s coming down next to set things right.” Under her breath she said, “God, look how far it is.”

  “Don’t look down.” Sonia helped her up to a sitting position on the rail. She put her hand under Melissa’s chin to keep her looking up. “I feel we ought to send you down with a fraternity paddle or something to help you keep them all in order.”

  “Oh, listen, I eat these kids for breakfast. I can handle sixty or seventy of them with one hand.”

  There were some hoots from the remaining children.

  “By the book, now. Eyes closed, hold tight, let me hear you…”

  “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  Loren was still wondering how to catch her when she started down. Her skirts blew up on the way and he found himself staring at her flowered undies. Melissa wrapped one arm around the headstay to partly break her fall, but still flattened him on the deck. She landed on top of him, their faces almost together.

  “You must be Loren.”

  “Umph.”

  “Melissa.”

  They took all the ten, eleven, and twelve year olds on Columbia, nearly sixty of them. Sonia stayed to help out on one of the remaining boats. By five in the afternoon, the Stella Linda had settled quietly and levelly into the Windward Passage, allowing all the boats to cast loose and pull away safely. From there it was almost dead down wind to Baracoa. They arrived in the late twilight, the Columbia and twelve smaller boats under sail. The residents of the village were turned out by the sound of the children singing, one hundred and fifty voices. Together with the adult advisors and crew members, they almost doubled the population of the community.

  20

  THE COUNCIL OF HATUEY

  A small cottage room on a sweltering tropical night: A man and a woman are on the rumpled bed, she sleeping peacefully and he tossing about. The sheets are limp, sticky with sweat. This is like sleeping (or trying to sleep) in a garden hothouse, mid-summer at noon. A thick oppressive heat seeps in from without. All day long the sun has beat down on the heavy wet vegetation. It has left the clearing near the little white and green cottage simply steaming. Through the window a swirl of mist is visible. So much hot fog rolling about outside in the square, the air is dense with it. Poor Chandler; his nightshirt is soaked all the way down the back with sweat. He is thrashing fitfully in the bed, fitfully. He will not sleep until morning, and he knows it, and then for only the briefest few minutes before the wake-up of all these noisy people. From that point on it will be the usual hullabaloo. He is just too old to be living with so much activity, so many kids around, hundreds of them, how did he ever manage before? How did he ever bear up without a little peace and quiet? Not much chance of there ever being peace and quiet here, because this is just not a peaceful place. Not one of those places where “peace comes dropping slow, dropping like the veils of…” Like the veils of whatever. Where was it that peace came dropping slow? It was a line from something he had had to learn by heart back at the Hill School. Now the recollection is coming back to him. It was on an island where peace came dropping slow. It was on an island, but definitely not on this island. It was an island from a poem. Or, perhaps, a poem from an island.

  What a jumble. There is no use struggling in bed with all these stupid thoughts. Get out into the air. Let Candace at least have her rest. The subtle and altogether normal grunting of a dignified man, swinging his feet over onto the floor and pushing himself upright. The open door is just before him. With two hands to steady himself on the door frame, he breathes in the hot damp night. There is not the hint of breeze. A glance up at the moon and stars, bright enough to cast shadows. He moves out into the center of the village green. About the central square are two dozen small cottages, built of white-washed stucco with dark green shutters and trim. There are palm leaves overhead, reaching down out of the mist.

  A tiny band of droplets on his upper lip; he can feel them beginning now to evaporate and cool. Evaporation of sweat is the only cooling effect that works anymore. Why was that, again? It had all been explained over and over, why motors don’t work and all that, but it hadn’t stuck. For whatever the reason, there was no way anymore to keep things cool. You had to stay all wet to be cool. The human system is on overload trying to cool itself with sweat, his own human cooling system. There are pores over parts of his body that had not sweated for most of half a century—it’s a wonder that they still remembered how. Sweating, after all, had been effectively banished by civilization. Now it is civilization that has been banished by sweating. The hair on the back of his neck is dripping wet, dripping down his neck to between his shoulder blades.

  Moving out with a sigh into the night. It is the middle of the night, but he can see almost everything. He picks out the walkway leading away from the water. There is the sound of waves lapping on the beach at his back. On his left side is the loom of a dark green wooden building, a pump house of some sort tucked into the trees. The road under him is of soft dirt. Chandler, striding forward past the schoolrooms and athletic fields.

  Beyond the village, the path begins to narrow. There are palm trees, in thick clusters, palm trees everywhere. They have a faintly evil sense to them. Everything else is here at their forbearance, at the forbearance of the jungle. Because the jungle lets it all exist, for the moment. When it wants, it can reclaim every bit of its territory by growing up and around man’s pitiful buildings, roads, clearings. The palm trees are closing in around him now. They would like to grow right through him, but they are slow and he is fast. A slight movement among the thick palm trunks. Some of them are waving dreamily all up their lengths. A swaying undulation. Hold on here, these are not palm trees at all. They are snakes, fat vertical snakes standing up on their tails. They swing together to a rhythm. Chandler can see the snakes’ faces clearly. The faces seem more human than reptilian, soft brown eyes with eyelashes. As he watches, the snakes begin to sing in harmony. They have high female voices. Is this illusion or do they seem awfully familiar? The voices seem familiar. By god, it’s the Andrews Sisters. The faces of the snakes even look like the Andrews Sisters, however many of them there were. They are singing about the troubles of loving a fickle and inconstant man. Wow, who would have expected such a show here of all places?

  He’d like to pause a while and listen, but it just isn’t to be. There is no time now for entertainment, no matter who the snakes are. Chandler puts his head down, presses on. Behind him, the Andrews Snakes repeat the chorus, calling after him. But he has to press on because he has a Call. He has got to be where he has got to be, up ahead, because of his Call.

  The moon seems even brighter now. His path, no doubt, has taken him to the relative high land, rising up out of the ground mist. It is still thickly hot. When he shakes his head, drops of sweat fly off, glittering in the moonlight. Among the jungle sounds are the songs of tree frogs or crickets, or perhaps the songs of other gifted snakes, able to do their own impersonations. There is one sound more insistent than the rest. It’s going BEEEE-DEEEE-DEEET, BEEEE-DEEEE-DEEET. Now at last there is a clearing just ahead. The moon casts its spotlight down into the center of the cleari
ng, picking out something there on a raised dais. As he approaches he can see it is a telephone in the circular spot, a robins-egg blue telephone. Now, immediately under his eyes, the phone goes BEEEE-DEEEE-DEEET, BEEEE-DEEEE-DEEET.

  One thing unique about this phone is its size. It is really big. Bigger than a regular phone by ten or more times. Chandler struggles to lift the handset. Why is the phone blue, anyway? If his Hot Line phone back in Fiske House was red, is this one then a Cool Line phone? That’s it, a Cool Line. He has to cover his mouth to keep in the giggles at his little joke. Finally, with a great heave, he pries the phone into position with its huge earpiece beside his head. The mouthpiece is resting on the jungle floor at his feet. He has to shout down into it to be heard.

  “Hello?”

  A heavy, deep voice, rumbling out of the phone and from the trees around the clearing: “Chandler. This is the Third Floor Prefect.”

  “Oh my.” The phone line from the base of the phone, now that he notices it, goes straight up, disappearing into the darkness above the tops of the palms. It must go directly up to the third floor. “Yes. I am here. I mean, this is Chandler Hopkins. Speaking.”

  “We have been talking about you up here on Third.”

  “Well.” This could be good or it could be terrible, being noticed up on Third. Chandler hugs the handset to his ear, hoping for the best.

  “We have been thinking that a Mission might be just the thing that you need. Something to give focus to your life.”

  “Oh.”

  “So we have assigned you a Mission. It’s your assignment. There will be a grade.”

  “Dear me, a grade.”

  “How well you do with your Mission will determine your ranking among the others. Are you getting all this?”

  “Oh, I am. Yes.”

  “The Mission is so important it cannot be discussed over the phone. So you can’t even ask a question about what it is. Not even one question. Do you have any questions?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Well that’s it then. That, as We say, is it.”

  “Yes. That much is clear. May I speak of this Call, I mean of this Calling to my fellow men?”

  “Of course. Tell them everything.”

  “Yes. What ‘everything,’ specifically shall I tell them?”

  A frightening pause. “Tell them that their worst fears are confirmed: There is no God. None at all. You can quote Me on that.”

  “I can?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the whole message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for the Call and all that.”

  “One more thing, Chandler.”

  “Yes?”

  A long, pregnant pause. And then the Voice again, deeper and more ominous than ever: “Beware the Chink.”

  “What?” Chandler waiting for something more, an explanation. Instead there is only the sound of a disconnect. This is not a simple click, but a painfully loud sound, metallic and ringing, a deafening clink. He can still hear the clink echoing in his surely damaged ear.

  Unsteady on his feet because of the shock of the noise. He is dazed. He has let the handset fall to the ground. Damn, the thing is heavy. But it can’t be left there or there could be hell to pay. A grunting heave to lift the handset back onto the cradle. And then just a moment to rest and let his head clear. He stops to wonder if he ought to be making some other call. This after all is a working telephone, perhaps the only one left on earth. Whom could he call? But wait, he shouldn’t be calling anyone, he should be thinking only of his mission. Don’t forget the mission. Oh, oh. Panic. Suppose he should forget the message that he was to pass on to Mankind? What a black eye that would be for Chandler Hopkins. It wouldn’t go down at all well on Third. The effect on the grade is only half his worry. Chandler begins looking around feverishly for a pencil. He has got to have a pencil to write the message down. There was one earlier in his nightshirt, but nothing to write on. And the point is broken. Perhaps there will be a pencil sharpener here in the drawer of the dais. Opening up the drawer. But no, there are more snakes inside, slithering. Snakes and condoms. Oh dear, the drawer is simply full of those little packaged condoms. Shut it quick before someone comes. He is obliged to sharpen the pencil with the edge of a sharp stone. He can write on the long white expanse of his shirt, which is polished from the iron, polished into a crisp white papery surface. The message is…write it quickly now before it’s forgotten entirely. The message is…What was the message? He can’t remember. It was all so clear just a moment before, it was on the tip of his tongue. Now he has only the point of the pencil on the tip of his tongue.

  Fortunately this is a dream and can be rewound and played back like a video. He has got the handset in his arms again, ready to listen, carefully this time. Humming of the rewind. There, that should be far enough. OK, Stop. Forward/Play to replay. “Could you please repeat the message, please.”

  “This is the message, Chandler. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, ready.”

  “Beware the Clink.” CLINK.

  Baracoa had been the original capital of Cuba. Christopher Columbus looked into the bay of Baracoa as part of the expedition of 1502, attracted by the startling profile of Yunque Mountain in the heights above. Then in 1512, one of his officers, Diego de Velazquez, returned to the bay with a force of 300 men to subjugate the Tainos Indians. The Indian leader was named Hatuey. Hatuey was disinclined to be subjugated by the Spanish or by anyone else. He held off the invaders, inflicting surprisingly many casualties in the process. The Spanish record tells of one particularly “cowardly” (i.e. successful) attack by canoe during the dark of the night. When he was finally captured by Velazquez, the Indian prince was given the usual choice of converting to Christianity or being burned at the stake. He converted but they burned him at the stake anyway, Cuba’s first revolutionary martyr.

  More than four centuries later, a government of 1950s revolutionaries erected a school on the outskirts of Baracoa and dedicated it to Hatuey. It was at this school where the Layton party finally established its base.

  In the large boys’ and girls’ dormitories, they settled their new charges, rescued from the Motor Ship Stella Linda. There was a faculty village not too far away. It consisted of twenty four pleasant little whitewashed houses, arranged around a grassy commons. The Escuela Hatuey provided lodging, school rooms, playing fields, a covered outdoor dining hall, kitchens, meeting rooms, everything they could have asked. There was a protected bay, deep enough for their vessels. The Matires de Giron hydropower station was located in mountains, some forty miles inland. It was one of only two hydro-electric facilities on the island of Cuba. Mr. Pease, who knew a little about everything and a lot about a surprising number of subjects had set out toward the station with a handful of Danny McCree’s shelter workers. With some serious tinkering on the transmission network, he believed they could have steady electric power flowing to the school in a matter of weeks.

  Virtually everything about the school was Spartan. In the administration building, however, was one rather splendid office. Senator Hopkins unhesitatingly took it over for himself. On the floor above his office there was a wide meeting room, open to the breezes on all four sides. Here he convoked his first Leadership Council.

  Chandler stood at the head of the long meeting table. About him were arrayed the twenty adults he had listed in his notebook this morning under the heading “Resources.” Together with himself, they made up what history would remember, at least what he hoped history would remember, as the Council of 21. He would have to suggest that name in his memoirs. History had need of punchy names to help make things memorable.

  “Ahem. Well, good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. I see that we’re all ready to begin. I’m going to start us out with a question. The question is, What fundamental directions shall we select for the guidance of our new society? For that is what we are charged with today, the building of a new society. We are the guardians of the peaceful notion
of civilization. Without us, that is, without the intervention of Dr. Layton…” he nodded smilingly toward Homer, “without that intervention, civilization might have ceased to exist on the planet. So we are, in a very special sense, the guardians of civilization itself. I daresay that never before in history has such a small band of men, of men and women, that is, for women too are part of the building of, or, that is, they are also charged with, and I can’t overemphasize this point because it would be quite impossible, charged with…well, let me just say charged. And I might add that in addition to being the general guardians of a whole planet, we are also the specific guardians of the host of young people that we have rescued in the last week. So you can see that my mission, that is, our mission here today is guardianship.

  “The responsibility lies heavily upon us. But I have no doubt, none whatsoever, that we are up to the task. As I look around at this group, I believe that I could not have selected myself a more appropriate array of talents to cope with what lies ahead. To deal with our leadership needs, we have virtually the entire administration of a fine major university. To deal with our technical problems, we have some of the most highly esteemed scientific minds in the world. To deal with the education of our young charges, we have scholars. We are fortunate to have the essence of three proud organizations: the American Physics Society working group; the Academy of Arts and Sciences (we have here most of its very honorable and respected selection committee), and, of course, Cornell University. Look about you now to appreciate the good fortune we have had.”

  Chandler gestured expansively, directing their attention around the room. “Doctor Layton, to my right, and his four able young assistants. Chancellor Brill, here on my left. Mr. Tomkis from the office of my good friend the Secretary of State. Dr. Corliss Taft of the National Academy, and I might mention, a director of the President’s National Task Force on Literature and Literacy. Cornell’s Proctor, Mr. Theodore Pinkham, just on Dr. Corliss’s left. Then Dean of Women, Dr. Maria Sawyer, and so on, and so on, and so on.” At the last “and so on,” he ended up gesturing toward Jared Williams, his butler from Fiske House days. The Senator looked away uncomfortably.