couples started to fall in love, so too was a very special bond established among the six of us.
That first afternoon we followed a routine that we stuck to for ten fabulous days, until it was disrupted by the end of the world. The line-dancing class began promptly at three o’clock. Roxy removed the listing of the class from the daily notice of activities so that it remained limited to just our own little group. I can’t say that we became accomplished dancers, but we had a hell of a lot of fun; and we did improve (the guys a little, the girls a lot; they were naturals). First we tackled “Cowboy Hustle” and “Tennessee Stroll,” then Roxy took us to a higher level with “Country Strut” and “Eight Corners.” After an hour of lively stepping, we retreated to our favorite lounge, one of the dozen or so on the ship. It was at these gatherings that we quickly became a debating club. We discovered a shared passion for discussion—for argument, I should say—that developed from the group’s natural chemistry.
Herb is a born debater, someone who looks for a verbal challenge wherever he goes. He is certainly the one who got us started. As for the rest of us, we each found something within the group that evoked an urge to talk, an outspokenness that was not our usual way.
Once the debate was over, usually by six p.m., the couples went their separate ways. The evenings were dedicated to friendship, and soon more—very much more. As we sailed south from the equator into the December summer of the Indian Ocean, romance flowered under tropical skies.
Roxy had her job responsibilities as teacher and entertainer, and Tom had his commitments in connection with the seminar program; but they both managed to find time to pursue what had become their primary interests, Herb and Mary, respectively. Sarah and I were more or less completely free around the clock, and that was exactly what we wanted, to be together.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!” Sarah quoted Wordsworth to describe our days and nights at sea. My new love, the English major, was much given to literary quotations. “I’ll try to keep it under control,” she said sheepishly, by way of apology. The fact was, I adored every word she spoke.
We spent some of our mornings on shore, taking preplanned tours of Africa’s southeastern coast: Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and finally South Africa. But the itinerary that had seemed so appealing when I read about it in a brochure paled in comparison to what Sarah and I were discovering in each other. I’m afraid that I didn’t learn as much as I might have about the interesting places we visited; my heart and mind just weren’t into it. Instead, I experienced ten days of pure happiness, and then…
After the cataclysm, as the sky first glowed red, then darkened, as the outside air grew lung-searingly hot and then bitter cold, and as we became gradually aware of what had happened in the world, our group spent hours together talking, sometimes lapsing into long silences, and privately—although we did not at first speak of it— praying. Sarah, Mary, Herb, and I, traveling with our parents—and Mary and Herb with younger sisters—had been spared the ultimate pain of losing those closest to us. Roxy, although she wept bitter tears for the human race, acted as if she never had a family of her own, and rebuffed any of us who approached her on the subject. Tom had suffered the greatest loss of all—parents, a large and close group of siblings, and lots of nieces and nephews. He reacted with a bleak stoicism that saddened us all. Mary tried to ease his sorrow with religious consolation, but he gently dismissed her efforts.
At one point, Roxy impulsively suggested that we resume our line-dancing classes. We knew that she meant well, but we didn’t have the heart for it. There is a popular image of mobs, amid the ultimate calamity, engaged in orgies of drink, dance, and sex. Supposedly this happened during the plagues of the Middle Ages, and it has been envisioned in speculative stories and science fiction books. That’s not the way it was with us. An extra beer, yeah, why not? But we had no spirit for wild partying. None.
Yet, while we gave up our dancing—although we vowed to return to it one day—we still needed to talk. And one of the things we talked about was the miracle of our coming together, finding each other, and being spared together. We marveled at the phenomenon of our dancing and falling in love at the very moment that the universe was hurling the most awful devastation at our planet.
After the ship sank, and we found ourselves castaways on a desolate beach, physical needs took priority over philosophical debate. We were busy all day, helping with the basic work of establishing a camp. Yet in the evenings we six managed to find each other and huddled together on the sand, wrapped in blankets, looking like refugees in some disaster zone—which is what we were.
I remember in particular one discussion we had soon after coming ashore. The expeditionary force had left that morning, headed inland, and there was widespread worry about what they were likely to discover. Nevertheless, when the six of us got to talking, our spirits took wing. With the natural optimism of youth (as my father would say), we felt intuitively that we would survive. What we viewed with fascination and alarm was the reality of being cast back, technologically, more than six millennia.
I recalled having studied, as part of my undergraduate course work, the crafts of the Iroquois Indians of New York State, and being fascinated by the ways in which they coped with life in the Stone Age. The earliest Dutch explorers found the Iroquois manufacturing nets, twine, and rope from elm, cedar, and basswood barks; weaving baskets, mats, moccasins, belts, and burden straps from vegetable fibers and animal hair; tanning deerskins and decorating them with hair and shells; fashioning clay vessels and clay pipes; carving wooden ladles, spoons, dishes, and ceremonial masks. These so-called primitive people built impressive longhouses, manufactured excellent canoes and paddles, bows and arrows, snow-shoes, lacrosse sticks, spears, tomahawks, and war clubs. They used antlers to make knife handles, digging blades, awls, combs, needles, and fish hooks. They manufactured hoes by sharpening the shoul der blade of a deer or the shell of a tortoise and fastening it to a stick. They fashioned stone mortars for pounding corn, grinding mineral paint, and for pulverizing roots and barks for medicine.
The Iroquois, of course, were just one tribal group among the myriad whose prehistoric handicrafts have been uncovered and studied by archaeologists. Even the most sophisticated engineer cannot fail to be dazzled by the evidence of technical genius exhibited in natural history museums in every corner of the world. It is bewitching to stare at the objects in display cases and to think of living like these early peoples lived, without factories and power plants, without bulldozers and jet planes—creative and ingenious, yet dwelling in harmony with nature.
“Perhaps,” I mused, “just perhaps, this is the way we ought to go.”
“We may have no choice,” Herb said, “depending on what the expeditionary force finds—or doesn’t find.”
“It sounds good to me,” Roxy said. “A new beginning. A new world. A chance to develop our own Garden of Eden.”
“Oh, come on,” Tom said. “Don’t tell me you’ll be happy to live your life without indoor plumbing, television, and air conditioning?”
“To say nothing of Mozart and Shakespeare,” murmured Sarah.
Roxy smiled sadly, shrugged, and remained silent.
“I can tell you one thing,” Tom persisted. “The six hundred engineers in our group are not going to settle for some kind of primitive paradise. What we want is technological progress, plenty of it and the sooner the better.”
“Easy does it,” Herb said. “Whatever we decide to do, it’s going to take time. I know you feel a sense of urgency, Tom, but remember, we have no place else to go.” He winked at Roxy.
“Also,” I said, “you can’t think just in terms of yourself and a few like-minded Western techies. There are many different people around here with ideas of their own. Engineers are not a majority, even among the passengers. And there is considerable variety even among the engineers. Our tour group contains, by design—I know because I saw how my father and his committee put it together—a large number of young people, a balance between the sexes, a certain amount of ethnic diversity, and a twenty percent representation from foreign countries, that is, from outside the United States. Asians are particularly well represented, being leaders in the engineering profession in the United States as well as in their native lands. The ship’s company also comprises many under-thirty folks, and features a striking assortment of different types. Captain Nordstrom and his officers are mostly Scandinavian. The seamen are mostly Asian. The rest are from just about everywhere.
“As for the inhabitants of this area where we landed—assuming some have survived—they are certainly mixed: not only South African blacks and whites; but, from what I have learned, a surprisingly large number of Indians and Pakistanis, more than ten percent of the local inhabitants. The population of this world of the future is
