A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “Hello Baracoa. This is Keesha.”

  Loren snatched up the headset with its mike. He held one of the headphones against his ear. “Go ahead, Keesha. Loren here.”

  “We have seven white sailing boats coming by now. They are armed to the teeth.”

  “Go ahead.” Loren leaned out the window as he listened. He caught Dan McCree’s eye and gestured toward the alarm bell. He made an exaggerated imitation of ringing the bell. Dan took off toward the bell at a run.

  “Loren, they are seriously armed. They have placed platforms way up the mast on each boat, just above their jibs. And on those platforms they have mounted big crossbows. There is a man up there on each platform and a quiver of many arrows.”

  “Nasty,” he said. He was so relieved they were coming down through the channel rather than from the south that he hardly cared about crossbows. He could hear the alarm bell pealing outside. “What else?”

  “Lots of men on each boat. Adjouan is trying to get a good count. They are sailing right close along the beach. He says they are looking for women out bathing. So we can see pretty well. But we are hidden.”

  “Good.”

  “The men have got sidearms. Loren, could they have guns? They have black pistols showing in their white uniform holsters.”

  “Compressed air guns, I guess. I wish we had thought of that. But they don’t have much range. What else?”

  Edward had come charging in through the door. Still listening to Keesha, Loren wrote “7 wht. bts., armed” on a pad in front of him for Edward to see.

  “Get her to describe the boats, Loren”

  Loren branched the audio over to the speakers so Ed could hear. “Keesha, tell me what the boats look like.”

  “They are long, as long as Irena, for example. And they have two masts each, ketches or yawls, I cannot tell which. They are all seven quite identical.”

  Edward was nodding. “The McMillan yawls. Ancient match racing boats from Annapolis. Trust the Navy to send the only thing they have to make up a uniform fleet. We can certainly outsail those old tubs.”

  “OK, enough, Keesha.” He wanted her off the air before her signal could be picked up by anyone on the yawls. “You know what to do now?”

  “We wait for them to pass, and then sail north and east as fast as we can in case there is any gas released in the battle. We put up at some other honeymoon island until you tell us it’s OK to come home.”

  “Yes. Sign off now. Good Luck.”

  “Cheers.” A click and the static was gone. It wasn’t her last word that stuck in his mind, but the phrase “OK to come home.” He grabbed his pack and dashed after Edward toward the dock.

  Homer Layton cast Columbia off from the dock. He stood by the piling for a moment as she gathered way. Then, almost as an afterthought, he hopped on board. Loren was too busy to notice, too busy plotting his way between the other vessels, all moving away from the docks at the same time. There was a flapping of sails on all sides. The breeze was fresh from the east. Beside him, Proctor Pinkham was timing the scramble with an old-fashioned windup stop watch. He had applied, in some haste, a dab of white zinc oxide to the tip of his nose. When Kelly came up from stowing the SHIELA terminal below, she stopped to smooth the white paste more evenly for him. Proctor Pinkham barely noticed.

  “Under twelve minutes,” he announced. He sounded a little breathless. The Proctor turned around to stare forward, still holding the watch in his right hand, as though looking for something else to time. Once clear of the breakwater, Loren called for a staysail. He glanced down at the Kenyon as soon as the big extra sail was pulling. They were doing nearly nine knots. Their course was a close reach all the way to the contact point. At this rate they would be there shortly after dawn. The rest of the fleet was arrayed behind him, sixteen all together. That left three on station in the approach to Baracoa Bay, and one still looking out to the south. He looked down at Kelly, seated in the cockpit by his side. She was quietly examining her nails. His eyes were on her, but his mind elsewhere. He was thinking that there was a lot more wind than he had expected. The other fleet had the same wind as they did, so it had no particular effect on their relative positions. Only, if it held, he reminded himself, the actual clashing of the two fleets would take place over a much shorter period than he had anticipated. From first visual contact to the end of the battle might be less than an hour. Far better for them would be a gentle becalming breeze when they finally met, so they could pick off their adversaries at leisure as they luffed helplessly before them.

  What else was there to worry about? He considered again the deployment of boats he had planned for the actual moment of contact. Columbia and Palomar, with their two SHIELA stations would be on opposite sides of their line. Each would have two spotter boats at distances of two hundred meters, one to port and one to starboard. These six would constitute the front rank. The other ten vessels would hang back, ready to fill in or to fight if any of the enemy got through. He hoped that none would.

  They had been practicing for weeks, spotting and triangulating targets and ripping them apart with sizzling blue beams that seemed to come down from heaven itself. The psychological effect alone should be devastating. But they weren’t counting very much on that. Psychological effects depend on the enemy staying alive long enough to comprehend what he is up against, and that wasn’t in the plan. They intended to kill every single man of the invading fleet and to do it quickly, before most of them even knew what was happening. They dared not to take prisoners. Even a dozen prisoners would be an impossible burden for their small community. They could not ever trust them, and there was no effective means to keep them locked up.

  After their last practice battle, Kelly had taken him aside for a critique. He had listened carefully, making some notes as she went on. It still irked him sometimes that she felt competent to suggest changes to any of his own decisions, but he had learned to pay attention. Her suggestions were always worth listening to. She warned that it was a mistake to practice separately from the second SHIELA unit. The real problem would be coordinating between the two. When coordinates were called out in the heat of battle, how were they to know if they were intended for Palomar or for Columbia? When a laser burst shot down, how were they to know which of the two vessels had directed it? These were still unsolved problems. She had also suggested that he keep his own hands free. He ought not to handle a line or the helm or the SHIELA keyboard himself, it could only distract his attention from the bigger picture. He looked down guiltily now at his hands on the wheel. He gestured for Homer to come forward and take the helm.

  Homer was, in most respects, the best helmsman on board. He had a steady hand on the wheel and an innate sense of where the straight line of their course led across the featureless sea. It was true that he had to put on his reading glasses to see the binnacle compass, but with the wind so firmly in its slot from the east, that hardly mattered today. The chief disadvantage of putting Homer at the wheel was that it made him more than usually talkative. Whatever he had been pondering quietly before now came tumbling out of him in a rush as soon as he had his hands on the helm:

  “Such a cipher is the human being. I am considering this perfectly idly. But now imagine that people weren’t ciphers at all. Just imagine we put a little window on the top of everybody’s head so you can look inside and see the mental activity, like one of those ant colonies. This is perhaps a superior design for the human creature. Gentlemen and ladies always leave their hats off in public places so as not to be suspected of sneaky thoughts.” Kelly looked up for a hint in his expression as to where all this might be headed, but Homer’s face showed no expression at all. His eyes were locked on the horizon. “Now as you make your way down the corridor of the Number 4 bus downtown to Ithaca, this is just as an example, you take a peek at the top of each head. Here is a kid, a twenty year old, male or female, and what is going on inside that 20-year old brain? Seven times a minute there is a thought about sex. Seven times a minute! T
his is actual fact. That’s what it’s like to be twenty. Next you pass an accountant perhaps, planning for a tax audit; inside her head is a 1040 form with certain items highlighted in pink. And just beside her is a man thinking out an addition to his house, a new bathroom for his teenage daughters, so inside the window you see a blueprint. And another fellow is going off for groceries, so the window is a jumble of the stuff he needs: frankfurters, mayo, Windex, oranges, bread. Finally, there on the last seat is a physicist. You look inside his head and what do you see but an alternate universe.

  “Our own regular universe is not complicated enough for the physicist, he’s got to think up another one. Who else but a physicist would think up a universe where people have windows on the tops of their heads? or where the speed of light is 15 miles an hour? or whatever? Our old familiar universe is just not complicated enough for these physicists. And just think how complicated it is!

  “I’ll tell you how complicated it is. Through a wonderful piece of conjecture, Horstman has put a bound on the count of particles in the universe. If you could count them all up and write down the number of them, Horstman has proved that that number would fit into ten to the nineteenth digits. That’s something more than a billion trillion decimal digits, you’d have to write down just to record the simple count. So there are great many particles, you agree. And each one can take on a nearly infinite number of different states, different positions, for example. The total complexity of the universe is a function of the number of particles and the number of states that each one can take on. You could think of it as a vector in n dimensions where n is bigger than big. Talk about complex. And yet it’s not enough for the physicist. What does the fellow want?” He turned appealingly to Loren, who was busy thinking only of this universe.

  “But the physicist can also think of a very simple thought. I myself have thought some astoundingly simple thoughts. The simplest thought I ever thought was of an alternate universe with only one particle in it. No, wait, I have thought of an alternate universe with no particles at all. Now that is simple. But dull. Compared to that, the dullest idea on the whole rest of this planet is simply fascinating. But a universe with only one particle is simple but pretty interesting. Let’s say the lonely particle is a quark. It can take on four possible states or flavors: Up, Down, Strange and Charmed. Let’s say that it’s Up at the moment. And then through the magic of quantum physics, it chooses a random moment to change. It becomes charmed. Or it chooses to decay into muons. Who knows why it does this? But it does. And the total complexity of the universe is increased. Our friend Feynman has suggested that each time such a thing happens, the universe splits into two. Each time there is a choice, the number of universes increases: one universe where the quark changes state and another where it doesn’t.”

  “Homer, for Christ’s sake,” Loren implored. “We’re going into a battle. We’re about to fight for our lives.”

  “In this universe we are. In some other universe, we are all back at Cornell, getting together for a summer swim in Beebe Lake. Because the Cuba Plan never happened. Or we are still sunning on the Baracoa beach, because the other side couldn’t get it’s act together to attack. Or thought better of it.”

  “But this is this universe.”

  “This is, but the other ones aren’t. According to Feynman’s Sum Over the Probabilities Theory, the other universes are all there and just as important as ours. And just this moment, I am thinking about one of them, the one where I didn’t turn the switch on the effector.”

  “Oh, Homer.” Kelly rolled her eyes.

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about. It is just the same as this universe only I didn’t intervene. I am wondering what it’s like over there at this moment. I would like to send a message over there: Hey, how are things going with you guys? And get an answer. I’m wondering if the situation didn’t work out a little better than we thought. Like maybe there was only one bomb or a limited exchange and then sensible people on all sides intervened and said, ‘now hold on here, this is plain silly.’ And so, they worked things out without killing people and without terminating the achievements of the last two centuries and without food riots and old people dying from the cold because there isn’t enough energy and transport. A physicist in that universe might look over into ours and think, what a dumb universe that one is, with so many people dead all because one old man couldn’t keep from imposing his solution on everybody else.”

  “Homer, I’m getting very cross with you,” Kelly said. “This is stupid talk. You did what you had to do. And now you are crying over spilt milk.”

  “No, not spilt milk. A salesman or a bus driver thinking these thoughts would be crying over spilt milk. But a physicist is just thinking of alternate universes.”

  “Why are you going back again over all of this? You are being terribly self-indulgent. I think you are a foolish old man.”

  “Ah. I think so too. This is true in virtually all the universes I have considered. Layton is a foolish old man. It is a given.”

  “You are feeling mortal, is that it? You’re thinking of dying. Because you are old. You are worrying about what to say when you meet your maker.”

  “Oh, no.” Homer smiled for the first time. “That is the one thing I am not worried about. I worry about tons of things, but not that one. Because, though it is a 100% certainty that I will show up for that meeting in the near future, the Maker is a very likely no-show. And even if he did show up, it wouldn’t give me much concern. He would say, Homer Layton, you caused tremendous death and suffering. And I will say, So look who’s talking.”

  “Well, let’s discuss something else, then.” She was still annoyed.

  “Or nothing,” Loren suggested.

  “It is the different amounts of death in the two universes that concerns me, the Cross Universe Death Differential, the C.U.D.D. I am chewing on my C.U.D.D. Because it accrues to me, you see. In my whole life I had never caused a death. I never even shot a bird or an animal. In my whole life I never set a mousetrap. And all of a sudden there is the Cross Universe Death Differential.”

  “Homer!” Kelly shook him by the shoulders. “You stop this immediately.”

  “Stop thinking?”

  “Stop torturing yourself.”

  “And me,” added Loren. He took off his binoculars and headed below to seek some quiet on one of the forward bunks, to think about the battle ahead.

  By dawn, they were in position just west of Little Inagua Island. The fleet of white yawls was not yet in sight or in radar range. Loren signaled for all vessels to anchor in the lee of the island. He rowed with Proctor Pinkham over to Palomar for a conference among the captains of the six first rank boats. The wind seemed to have abated a bit.

  Coming up over Palomar’s rail, Loren caught one foot in the safety cable and lunged forward. He came up hard against a young Chinese woman, one of the Guantanamo survivors. She lifted herself and then him up off the deck. “No harm done, Captain.” But for Loren the loss of dignity was painful. His control of the situation seemed so fragile. He was the de-facto commander of Baracoa’s fleet, but what was the source of his authority? At 28, he was the youngest of the captains, yet they all took their orders from him. In fact, it was his decision that had put each of the others in command of their boats. It was his plan that would guide them in the battle, it was his voice alone that could alter the plan. But why was that so? He wasn’t sure himself why he was in charge, so it was easy enough to imagine being deposed summarily by someone with real authority.

  He headed below, feeling foolish and weak. Of the seven who assembled in Palomar’s wide saloon, Loren seemed objectively the least likely choice to be the leader. Edward was more articulate, had just as good an analytical mind. Captain Van Hooten was more than twice Loren’s age. He had spent most of his life at sea. Klipstein, who had been first officer of the Stella Linda, was a natural manager. Candace Hopkins, captain of the sloop Rondolet, had proved herself a gifted sailor and had inspired
almost fanatical devotion among her crews. And Commander Clarence Wu who had returned with Dr. Chan from the Guantanamo expedition was their only real military officer. Loren had decided that these five were to be his co-captains, yet now that he thought of it, there was not one of them he could have excluded. They were all standing as he came down the companionway. He nodded first to Candace, still pretty in her fifties, with her striking lavender eyes, willowy and tall. Very tall. She was taller than Loren in fact; he had never realized it before. As he greeted the others, he realized with dismay that he was the shortest person present.

  Loren drew in his breath. “With your permission, Mr. Proctor.” He nodded toward Proctor Pinkham and continued. “We’re not going to wait here for the yawls to come to us. We’re going to sail down to them as fast as we can. It doesn’t matter where we meet them, but I have no intention of letting our crews fret for however many hours it may take to have the enemy sail up to us. Our meeting here this morning is going to take ten minutes, no more. Twenty minutes from now we will be proceeding directly down wind to the battle. Within a few hours it will be over.”

  He had brought some markers in his pocket from Columbia’s checker set. He now arrayed six of them in a line, three to one side and three to the other with a wide space between. “This is the front rank with the wind directly behind us. We’ll center ourselves on the approaching fleet. Columbia and Palomar are here and here.” he pointed to the middle marker of the leftmost group and then to the middle of the rightmost. “I’ll have Rondolet and Kiruna spotting for me on the left. Rondolet will be outside of me, Candace, and Kiruna on the inside, Commander Wu.” He pointed to the markers representing Rondolet at the end of the line and Kiruna, opposite. “On the right, we have Edward in Palomar, and Captain Van, spotting for him on his right in Zanzibar and Elgar Klipstein on his left in the sloop Sorel, respectively, here and here. The second rank vessels are arrayed behind us at a distance of 75 meters. They understand that they are simply not part of the battle unless one or more of the enemy vessels gets through.