Free Long Voyage Back by Luke Rhinehart

light of pre-dawn, only a foot away from hers. Fully awake, but still groping for reality, she looked speechlessly back at him.
    `Yes ... yes, of course,' she finally said. 'But let us get our stuff out.'
    When she tried to turn back to the car the man held her fast. Ì found them,' she heard the other man say, and saw he had her handbag and now the keys.
    The man holding her then flung her off to the side, sending her stumbling over the small embankment and down on to her face, rolling towards the shallow creek. The cold water struck her legs like a slap.
    `Let's go,' she heard a voice say.
    1 1
    Vagabond was moving towards Point Lookout with agonizing slowness. The nightmare of the war was compounded for Neil by the more personal and immediate nightmare of running in place, being unable to move forward no matter how hard he tried. It had seemed an endless crawling toward Crisfield with Frank in the wee hours of the morning, and since leaving him off just before dawn, an endless crawling in light winds to try to cross the bay.
    And as they struggled, the horror of the unfolding nuclear destruction was becoming more real. At the dock in Crisfield Frank had tried to telephone his wife and reported back dully to Neil and Jim: 'The operator didn't even try. She said - the operator said . . .
    "I'm sorry, Sir, New York State is disconnected." ' He'd laughed joylessly. They had all listened in the darkness to the transistor radio and on the entire A.M. dial they were able to bring in only five stations where normally there would have been forty or so. Dribs and drabs of hurried, sometimes barely coherent news drifted out. It often took the reporters several repetitions of each frightened report before a piece of grim news could be accepted as confirmed and indisputable. The idea that Washington and New York and apparently fifty to a hundred other places had been destroyed and that twenty to eighty million people had already been killed; that almost all major radio and television stations were not operating; and that the war was continuing: all this was almost beyond their ability to handle. It seemed beyond some of the announcers' abilities to handle. A few read the news items as if they were reading a weather report and made it seem so
    absurd that at one point Frank giggled. Others would become emotional and be replaced by a more controlled voice.
    One commentator pointed out that there was no way of knowing how many nuclear warheads had hit a given target, whether the target had been struck directly or peripherally, and whether the explosion had occurred on the ground or in the air. Knowledge that a place had been hit at all usually came only from that place's total silence. There were few eyewitness reports.
    All United States military personnel had been ordered to report for duty. Where the home base was 'no longer a viable alternative' they were ordered to report to the nearest military base of their service.
    The President issued a statement at 4.30 A.M. indicating that he and all cabinet members were safe, but that dozens, perhaps hundreds of US Congressmen had been killed in the blasts over Washington and other major cities. Offensive action had been commenced against the Soviet Union; nuclear war was occurring in Europe and Asia too. Although at least twenty major American cities had already been reported hit and twice that many missile and other military sites, the implication was that for some unstated reason the Russians hadn't unleashed as devastating an attack as might have been expected. To Neil it meant only that worse might yet come. One exchange between two announcers on the Norfolk radio station particularly depressed and frightened him. Ìs there anything new from the national news wire, Herb?' a man's tense, hurried voice asked.
    `There's still no contact with NBC news in New York, John. All we've got, actually, are the items we're picking up from WTUV in Richmond, but they seem to have a direct connection