And the deep blue sea

The chief went out. Captain Steen cleared his throat, and said, ‘The reason I asked to see you, Mr. Goddard, is that I’m writing a report of the—ah—shooting. You understand, of course, there will be a very thorough investigation with a great deal of paperwork, depositions, testimony, eyewitness accounts—’

Goddard was puzzled, as much by the captain’s uncertain manner as he was by this circuitous stalking of the obvious. Of course there’d be an investigation.

Steen went on. ‘And there were one or two—ah—details I wanted to check with you.’

‘Sure,’ Goddard said.

‘Now, you helped Mr. Lind carry Mayr into his cabin. You put him on the bunk, and Mr. Lind asked you to send somebody for the first-aid kit and sterilizer, is that right?’

‘No,’ Goddard replied. ‘He asked me to get them. I’d been to his cabin, and knew where they were.’ Lind had made sure of that, all right; he never missed a bet.

‘I see. And during the possibly two minutes you were gone, Mr. Lind was there alone. You came back, and it was probably a minute or two before I came to the doorway. You remarked that the hemorrhaging seemed dark for arterial blood, and Mr. Lind said it was probably from the pulmonary artery. Now, Mr. Lind is a former medical student and very expert at first-aid, so he knows more about this, probably, than either of us, but since I’m the master of the ship, the responsibility is mine, and I have to be absolutely sure that we did everything we could to save the man. If one of the big arteries had been severed, of course, there was no chance at all. Mr. Lind had the shirt cut away and the chest exposed, but being outside the door I couldn’t see very well. You were right at the foot of the bunk, so you could. Would you say the blood was pumping from the entrance wounds?’

Warning bells were beginning to ring everywhere. ‘That I couldn’t say for sure, Captain. All I know is there was a lot of it; enough to kill anybody.’

‘I see.’ Steen frowned. ‘But you could see the wounds all right?’

So we’ve finally got to the point, Goddard thought. He either suspects I didn’t see any, or he knows I didn’t see any, but that’s not what he’s after; he wants to know what I think. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I did.’

‘You didn’t? But you were right there by the bunk.’

‘Captain, the entrance wound of a nine millimeter slug is very small, sometimes no more than a dimple. Mayr had a thick mat of hair on his chest, and it was completely covered with blood, so his skin could have been punctured in six places without my seeing any of them. But I don’t understand what difference it makes, anyway. We know he was shot twice through the chest and died within five minutes, so any doctor will tell you nobody could have saved him.’

Steen nodded. ‘Then you have no doubts at all it was just as Mr. Lind said?’

‘None whatever, Captain.’ And you can quote me, if that’s the object of this. By all means quote me.

Steen made a notation on his pad, still frowning and thoughtful, and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s all. Thank you for coming up, Mr. Goddard.’

Goddard went back to the promenade deck, puzzled and even more uneasy. What was that for? The obvious answer, of course, was that Steen was a party to the plot and was probing, pretending to have doubts himself in order to trap him into an admission he was suspicious of it. But suppose Steen’s doubts were genuine. Where had they come from? And why now, with Krasicki dead? It was like sinking into quicksand, he thought; every time you think you’re back on solid ground it starts to give way under you again.

With the Leander lying motionless in the water where there was no whisper of breeze, the smell of burning cotton was evident for minutes at a time near the after well-deck, and twice he saw heavy wisps of smoke issue from the ventilators of number three. They drifted straight up, thinned, and disappeared. He wasn’t going to be very popular with the superstitious members of the crew when they discovered it, he thought; he’d already caused the death of two men, and now he’d set their ship afire. In spite of his uneasiness, there was a certain ironic fascination in the thought that while he might be able to cope with the blazing intelligence and educated mind of the mate, against ignorance there was never any defense at all.

He walked forward and stood at the rail watching the bos’n and four sailors fish-oiling the rusty deck plates of the forward well-deck. They were burned black, stripped to the waist, and dripping sweat under the malevolent glare of the sun. One looked up and saw him, and said something, and the others turned to stare for an instant. He wondered if it were merely the standard salute to a useless slob of a passenger who had nothing to do but live a life of ease, or whether it was more serious.

Madeleine Lennox came out of the passageway and joined him. She was wearing near the irreducible minimum of clothing, only shorts, halter, and sandals, but her upper lip was moist with perspiration and damp tendrils of hair stuck to her neck. ‘It’s unbearable,’ she said. ‘Inside or out. My cabin’s like a sauna.’

‘It’ll be a little better when we get under way again,’ Goddard said.

She looked around and spoke in a lower tone. ‘You recall what we were talking about last night? I finally remembered the thing that kept bothering me.’

He was instantly alert, but kept his face impassive. ‘About what?’ he asked.

‘Mayr. And that blood that came out of his mouth. You remember, just before Krasicki came in and let out that scream, you were telling us a funny story. Everybody was laughing, and Mayr started to cough. He put his napkin up to his mouth, and I think he probably slipped something in it, a plastic capsule of some kind he could open by biting down on it. Don’t you think that’s possible?’

Goddard felt a little chill between his shoulder blades and was aware he knew the answer to the question even before he asked it. ‘You haven’t told anybody else this?’

‘Just the captain,’ she replied. ‘At breakfast this morning.’

Maybe it was hopeless now, but he had to make one last effort. He smiled indulgently. ‘But isn’t there a flaw in your theory somewhere? If the thing was staged, why would Krasicki kill himself?’

‘How do we know he did? It could be another illusion.’

'I hate to tear your script to pieces,’ he said, ‘but he’s dead. I helped lift his body onto a bunk, and he was not only cold, but stiff.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, I guess that settles it.’

She would probably shut up now, but it was too late. Well, he asked himself, aren’t you going to warn her at all? Take up the ladder, Mate, I’m aboard. He sighed. ‘If there’s a chance in a million you’re right, you’ve stuck your neck out. Stay away from the rail at night, and keep your door locked.’

‘But I only told the captain.’

And the captain is a deeply religious man, who couldn’t possibly be involved in anything like that, he thought. Read the label attached to his arm. It identifies him the same as all other members of the cast. Krasicki was a gentle, persecuted Polish Jew, and Lind’s a big, exuberant, fun-loving boy who likes to doctor people. He excused himself and went to his cabin. He’d done his best, hadn’t he? And maybe Steen wasn’t involved in it.

If she figured out the mechanics of that dribble of blood from the corner of Mayr’s mouth, why hadn’t she been able to go one step further and grasp the self-evident fact that if the thing had been staged you no longer knew who anybody was? Of course, it was simple enough; so, also, was the blood on the shirt. It had been in a small balloon, or perhaps even another rubber article more likely to be found in the possession of seamen, attached to the inside of the shirt and punctured by the tiny awl Mayr’d had in his hand as he clutched his chest so dramatically after the second shot. Unfortunately, Mayr had dropped the awl in his cabin as they were lifting him onto the bunk, the only slip-up in the whole operation.

Then he, Goddard, had accidentally stepped on it, and had looked down and pushed it over against the bulkhead. The chances were Lind, who was washing his hands at the basin, had seen this in the mirror. This coupled with Goddard’s innocent remark that the hemorrhaging seemed dark for arterial blood, could be partly responsible for Krasicki’s death. The rest of the massive hemorrhage, of course, was easy. Lind had been alone in the cabin with Mayr for over ninety seconds while Goddard was running up to the next deck for the first-aid kit and sterilizer, and the blood was already there in some kind of container in the bedclothes. Obtaining it would have been no problem, not with three of them to donate, and Lind’s dispensary was equipped with hypodermic syringes and, no doubt, anticoagulants.

The rest, of course, was simply consummate staging and acting. Krasicki’s scream was calculated to paralyze the witnesses for the length of time necessary for him to get off the first two shots, the blanks, into Mayr’s chest, with the appropriate shuddering reaction from Mayr. Then Lind came in on cue, caught his arm and swung it up, while Krasicki kept pulling the trigger, now shooting live ammunition and breaking glass all over the place to give it the final touch of verisimilitude.

But all that was no longer important, he thought, as he lay in the sweltering stillness of his cabin. The question now was Steen. If he were involved, then Madeleine Lennox had told them the thing was never going to hold up; they had to eliminate her and anybody else they suspected she’d talked to. But even if the captain had had no part in it, there were still two very ominous possibilities. One was that he might now be suspicious enough, and naive enough, to order a search of the ship, which could trigger the final explosion of violence if Lind’s forces were strong enough. The mate couldn’t back out now; he was committed. The other danger was that even if the captain had better sense than to force the issue while the ship was at sea, Lind might already know of that breakfast conversation. Who knew where his spies were? The dining room steward could have overheard them. So could Rafferty, or Barset.

And what about the fire? The tween-decks of number three hold was the most likely place for Mayr to be hidden. It was directly below that cubicle where he’d been stitched into the burial sack, and when the switch had been made they wouldn’t have moved him any farther around the ship than they had to; the risk of detection was too great. What happened if the heat and smoke drove him out?

He swore irritably, and sat up to light a cigarette, trying to shake off the uneasiness. For God’s sake, he still didn’t know any of this, did he? The whole thing could be imagination. As though to corroborate this, the Leander began to vibrate then as the engine went full ahead and she got under way again. How could there be anything sinister about this prosaic old rust-bucket slogging her way around the Pacific?

* * *

The two fans droned monotonously in the dining room, stirring the muggy air. Krasicki’s death weighed on everybody’s spirits, as well as the enervating heat that apparently would never end. Captain Steen was more silent and withdrawn than ever, and even Lind was subdued. The state of their nerves was apparent when Karl dropped a dish as he was serving the jellied consommé. They all jumped, and had to restrain themselves from looking at him angrily. A sullen Rafferty came in to clean up the mess.

Karen Brooke spoke to Steen. ‘This weather must make you long for the Norwegian fiords, Captain.’

He nodded and managed a wan smile. ‘Yes. And it’s been nearly two years since I was home.’

Lind said to her, ‘But it just takes one winter gale in the North Atlantic to make this look good again.’

'I agree with you,’ Madeleine Lennox said. She began an account of being on a freighter that had been hove to for three days in the Bay of Biscay and how eventually she’d been physically exhausted just from the endless holding onto something and trying to keep from being thrown from her bunk.

Captain Steen interrupted her in a voice not much more than a whisper. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ Goddard looked around. Steen’s face had gone white and was stamped with anguish as he pushed himself to his feet. He started to collapse, but caught himself with a hand braced on the table.

‘Cap, what is it?’ Lind asked quickly.

He and Goddard were leaping up to help him when he swayed, crumpled forward against Karen Brooke’s shoulder, and fell to the deck. Both women cried out.

Lind and Goddard pulled his twisting body from under the edge of the table and into the open. Barset came running in. ‘Good God, what happened?’

'I don’t know,’ Lind snapped. ‘Get a stretcher!’

Barset hurried out. Steen’s eyes were closed and he appeared to fight for breath as he continued to writhe in agony. Lind caught his wrist and tried to feel the pulse. Steen twitched spasmodically and he had to grab for it again. Goddard caught the arm with both hands and held it still. Lind jerked his head at Karl. ‘Find the chief. Tell him to get an oxygen bottle up to the skipper’s quarters.’

To Goddard’s glance and the unasked question: heart attack? he replied, ‘I don’t know. But we’ll have it if we need it.’

Barset ran in with the stretcher. They lifted Steen onto it, but he continued to double his body in pain and twist from side to side. He would never stay on it going up the ladders. ‘We need some line!’ Lind barked. ‘Wait! This’ll do.’ With one explosive yank, he swept off the tablecloth, scattering dishes, food, water tumblers, and silverware across the deck. The big arms corded and there was a ripping sound as he tore it in two. He tossed one piece to Goddard, and they passed them under the stretcher and over the captain’s body at thighs and chest to lash him in place. One of the sailors hurried in.

‘Take him up,’ Lind ordered. ‘I’ll get the kit and be up there.’ He ran out. Goddard and the sailor picked up the stretcher, but at that moment the bos’n came in. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said. Goddard surrendered it, and followed them down the passageway. They started up the ladder, the sailor going first; the bos’n, with the strength of those almost grotesque shoulders and arms, lifted his end of it straight overhead to keep it level. They mounted the second ladder and disappeared onto the boat deck.

Several of the crew had gathered in the well-deck, looking up. Goddard was conscious of blank stares. ‘Jesus Christ, what next?’ one asked. ‘Anybody got a rubber raft?’ another said. ‘I’d bail out of this pot.’

Karen Brooke and Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway and joined them, both badly shaken. Mrs. Lennox said she thought it was a heart attack; it was very similar to the one that had stricken her late husband. It wasn’t necessarily fatal, she assured Karen; he’d had two, five years apart. As they stood waiting for some word, Goddard was conscious again of the odor of burning cotton. Ten minutes later Barset came down the ladder.

‘Mate says it was a heart attack,’ he said. The captain seemed to be in less pain now and was breathing easier, under the oxygen tent Lind had improvised. Sparks was getting medical information from the U.S. Public Health Service through a California station and was in contact with a cruise ship that had a doctor aboard. The liner was three hundred miles away, but if necessary both ships could change course and rendezvous in less than ten hours. Mr. Goddard could come up if he’d like.

The perennial witness, Goddard thought, as he mounted to the boat deck. The third mate was on the starboard wing of the bridge. Goddard knocked at the open door and went in through the office.

Steen lay on the bunk in his stateroom, still fully clothed except for his shoes. His head and shoulders were covered with an improvised tent made of a shower curtain suspended from overhead. A length of rubber hose led in under the edge of it from an oxygen cylinder lashed to a leg of the bedside desk. The first-aid kit and sterilizer were on the desk, and Lind was standing beside the bunk withdrawing the needle of a hypodermic syringe from Steen’s arm. He set it aside and took the captain’s wrist as Goddard came in. He glanced up, but said nothing. Goddard waited.

In a moment Lind released the wrist and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Much steadier now.’ He indicated the shower curtain. ‘Instant oxygen tent. But Boats is making one out of canvas, with a window in it.’

Goddard thought of Madame Defarge, knitting shrouds. Before this passage was over maybe the bos’n would sew everybody on the ship into canvas in one way or another. Sparks entered behind them and handed Lind a message. ‘From the Public Health Service doctors,’ he said.

Lind scanned it quickly, muttering to himself, ‘Umh-umh... digitalis... oxygen...” He folded it and stuck it in his shirt pocket, and said to Goddard, ‘Just the things we’ve already done.’ He turned to Sparks. ‘Tell the skipper on the Kungsholm we’ll stay in touch, but unless there’s a change we won’t try to transfer him. There’s not much they can do for him we can’t do on here.’

Sparks nodded and went out. If I watch a few more of these performances, Goddard thought, I could qualify as a drama critic. He looked at Steen then, saw the slowly rising and falling chest of this man he was certain was doomed to die without ever waking again, and felt revulsion at this sleazy glibness. But it was only protective, he tried to tell himself; it was one way to keep from picking at the scab of his own impotence.

In the first place, he didn’t know. Maybe it was a heart attack, instead of some kind of poison, and maybe it was digitalis Lind had given him, and not morphine. There was no way to find out, or prove it, and even if he could there was no place to take the information that Lind, the ship’s doctor, was murdering a helpless man except to Lind, the ship’s acting master. At sea, the next step up the chain of command was God.

‘Let us know if there’s any change,’ he said. He went out. As he passed through the captain’s office his eyes, in spite of himself, were drawn to the framed photograph of the woman and the two young girls. He winced.

9

It was a half hour before he had a chance to speak to Madeleine Lennox alone. She joined him on the promenade deck at sunset. ‘Do you believe it was a heart attack?’ she asked.

'I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could have been. But watch it.’

‘How? You mean I don’t even dare eat anything the rest of the trip?’

‘Not that. The only thing sure is that he’s too damned clever to repeat himself. And a heart attack in a woman’s not as plausible, anyway. But keep your door locked.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘You’re damned right I am.’

‘Seems a duplication of effort.’

‘What?’ he asked.

The smoke-gray eyes were wide and utterly innocent. ‘Bolting so many doors.’

Trying to warn her was futile, he could see that. ‘Then you don’t think it’s serious?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But don’t you remember how effective you were against lightning?’

Barset brought word shortly after ten that Captain Steen’s condition seemed a little better. His pulse was stronger, and less erratic, and he was sleeping. Lind was with him constantly.

Goddard heard six bells strike as he lay naked on his bunk in the sweltering dark. Almost immediately there was a light rap on the screen door. Not even bothering to pull on the shorts, he padded over and looked out through the louvers. It was Madeleine Lennox. He unlocked the door and pulled it open. She stepped inside quickly, and was in his arms while he was still trying to secure the door again. He had an impression of amusement mingled with the eagerness.

‘Your reputation’s ruined,’ she whispered against his ear. ‘I think Karen saw me.’

‘What about yours?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she has no illusions about me. Women never do.’ There was a little murmur of discovery and delight then. ‘Mmmmm. You must have been expecting me. Or somebody. Are you sure you weren’t in the coast guard, instead of the navy?’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘That motto of theirs I always adored. Semper paratus.’ She began throwing off the robe and pajamas.

She was much better company, he thought, after she’d caught the streetcar than while she was chasing it. She jettisoned all pretense along with her clothing, gave not the slightest damn whether she captivated him or not, and demanded nothing but the mechanics of sex. She reminded him of Wilde’s remark that England and America were two countries separated by the same language; the most intimate of all human relationships was the perfect barrier to any intimacy at all.

With Haggerty it had been speech. They’d been stoned together for five days up and down the coast from San Diego to Sea-Tac, talking constantly, once even spending the night in the same bedroom, and he didn’t know her first name, nor she his. Apparently there was some quality about people who lived in bubbles that enabled them to recognize each other from the first, because in the whole period only once had either of them asked a question to which he expected a serious answer.

He’d met her in the bar at the San Francisco airport. It was late in the afternoon on a weekend, so the place was overflowing, and the one double martini PSA allowed for the forty-minute flight up from Los Angeles International was wearing thin. There was no space at all at the bar, but he spotted a table occupied by a girl sitting alone, a slender, almost fragile-looking blonde with a mink coat thrown over the back of her chair. He went over.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ he asked.

‘Not at all.’ Her manner was as gravely gentle as that of a nun. ‘Actually, I’ve always wanted to see Buenos Aires.’

‘Oh, I’m off for the weekend,’ he said. 'I don’t take the job home with me.’ He ordered a double martini, and she asked for another Jack Daniels, which could be significant. She looked perfectly sober, but he’d seen more than one ethereal blonde still lifting them off the tray when strong men were asleep in corners.

‘Do you use chloral hydrate?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no. That went out with the crimps on the Barbary Coast. Our labs came up several years ago with a timed-release spansule; the opiate takes effect in about twenty minutes, and then an aphrodisiac eight hours later. Powdered rhinoceros horn.’

‘I always assumed that was a male aphrodisiac. Connotation, I suppose.’

‘Well, we add estrogen, of course, so there are no side effects, like facial hair. Actually, the world market is so depressed, now that Castro’s cleaned up Havana, we’re diversifying into pornography and textbooks, and phasing out the girl operation as fast as we can take care of key personnel.’

‘What’s your average net per unit laid down in, say, Saigon?’

‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Age, and so on. Are you a virgin?’

‘No, I’m sorry. I was violated in my teens by an ectomorph.’

He shook his head. ‘Trying to police the whole damn world, and a woman’s not even safe on the street.’

She introduced herself. She was Mrs. Haggerty, she said, from New Bedford. Her husband was a whaler.

* * *

Madeleine Lennox gave a shivery little gasp and said something, her lips moving against his. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You remembered right where they were. Oooooh!’

He was conscious of momentary wonder; he must be programmed by punch cards. They lay nude in each other’s arms in the darkness; he had a leg thrust between her thighs while his fingertips softly brushed the erogenous zones of her back. She jumped, and shivered again.

He was away a lot, Haggerty went on, but it was a good job challengewise, with the usual retirement, stock options, country club membership, expense account, and so on. Sparm, Inc., was one of the older companies with a reputation for being a little on the stodgy side, but it had been taken over by a conglomerate, shaken up, and given a transfusion of new blood, so it was a pretty gung-ho outfit and on the move, with plenty of room on the top side for a man who could carry the ball.

‘He’s just been picked to head up R and D,’ she said, ‘and I hardly see him from one month to the next. He’s all wrapped up in a new white whale they’re just getting off the drawing board and into hardware. The oil’s much lower in cholesterol, and there’s a big defense contract coming up as soon as they iron the bugs out of the polyunsaturated napalm they’re working on.’

He winced at the subliminal flash of the red Porsche as it spun out and went through the guardrail at a hundred miles an hour. Now and then in an unguarded moment some random word would get to him, even through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d seen it that last time less than an hour before she was killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three seconds at most, as she looked at him and her stepmother with loathing and disgust before she wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word ‘napalm’ had triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it, the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which now he meant, which manifestation of her father’s talents, the nonstop drunk or the automated lover.

‘Did they come up with a revolutionary new deodorant just recently?’ he asked Haggerty. ‘It seems to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them, and the stock went up thirty points in a week.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter that reduces tar and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s married to that whale. And when he does get home—’

'I know, that damn wooden leg,’ Goddard said. ‘It must be awkward.’

‘It’s not really wood,’ Haggerty said. ‘Except for a Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the executive washroom.’

He told her about the underground skyway, and how he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said, doing research for an article for Reader’s Digest, ‘New Hope for the Living: Never Leave the Airport.’ And while this was aimed at any sector of the populace which might have a cursory interest in survival, it would be of particular interest to serious drinkers.

In all bars except those in airports, you were marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long as you were inside because the natives were disarmed at the doorway; this tradition had been established in the Old West even before the invention of the automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some prescience or foreboding that the day would come when there would be much more sophisticated weapons abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked at the door in that happy era. And a Californian, forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated from it for any length of time, while prey to the same vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave one and move to another to escape some bore, and they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at thirty thousand feet.

Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards, the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted from one sanctuary to another across four hundred miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards. And there was just enough challenge to keep it interesting; you had to look sober enough to get aboard the airplane in the first place and to buy the two drinks they allowed you during the flight, but still far enough from it to obviate any possibility you might really dry out before you reached the next station on the underground.

She agreed with him that something should be done for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study. As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to pot and acid there was a very real danger they might become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a frozen daiquiri.

To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night, morning horrors, and as insurance against election days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly clenched and unclenched in agony.

‘I’m sorry, Haggerty,’ he said, for a moment forgetting the rules. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the first stupid thing I ever heard you say.’

She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of some of the early investigators intent only on a quick doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa, and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so many anthropologists had disappeared into the Californian countryside never to be heard of again. Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them were alive and well in Los Angeles.

She explained this one night when they were finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room. He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.

‘All we can do,’ he said, ‘is pray that Slivovitz got through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the rifles while I deliver the baby?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re falling into the same error, and for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff, and backtracking to discover where they were springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the same way.’

Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been by overlooking it. It had already been established that they were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering people who subsisted by selling each other things they called goods and services. His theory was that it was a dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or commerce could be carried on while they were going past each other in opposite directions at a combined velocity of a hundred and forty miles an hour.

Later investigators had decided the only way to the answer was to enter the dance and see where it led, which accounted for nearly all the missing scientists. It was estimated that at the present time there were still twenty-seven anthropologists circling endlessly around the Los Angeles freeways like spaceships in orbit, unable to find a way off.

Frownfelter’s paper, ‘The Carapace People of the San Fernando Valley,’ was by far the most reliable work on the subject, and the one that did the most to dispel the myth that they were hostile. ‘He spent a whole winter observing the members of a group near Van Nuys,’ she went on, ‘gradually gaining their confidence and allaying their fears that he intended any harm to the carapaces until he was allowed to approach quite near and study them at first hand. He found them quite friendly and open, and even eager to point out the advantages of their particular shells.

‘He was surprised to discover that they weren’t physically attached to the carapace in any way, even by an umbilicus, and that they could leave it at will, though they were always reluctant to do so. Whether this emotional attachment was sexual in nature or quasi-religious, he was never able to determine, but he inclined to the latter since it seemed to be shared equally by both sexes. Is there anything left in the bottle?’

One morning Haggerty was simply gone. She’d checked out before he got up, and left no message. Then, two days later, the drunk had abruptly come to an end. He was aboard an afternoon flight from San Diego to San Francisco. The miniskirted stewardess had just served him a double martini when he looked down and saw the blue of the Pacific below them and wondered how he could have been so stupid that it had never occurred to him before. He’d been searching in the wrong place all the time. It was out there. He handed the drink back to her. ‘Tell the captain to have one on me.’

‘You want him to lose his job?’ she asked with mock severity.

‘Give him a doggie bag. He can take it home.’

* * *

For the fifth time Karen Brooke tried to wrench her thoughts back to the book in her hands, but too many conflicting emotions were pulling at her. She was uneasy, and helpless, and illogically angry at herself. Captain Steen worried her, and she couldn’t make up her mind about Lind. He remained a complete enigma. One moment she trusted him, and then the next she was convinced he was a monster or madman.

And there was nobody she could talk to. Goddard? He was too self-sufficient and impervious to share any of her forebodings about this ship, and would only make her feel ridiculous. Further, in the past hour she had faced the fact, finally, that she didn’t like him, and it was the timing of this that had occasioned her self-anger. Why couldn’t she have arrived at the conclusion before she inadvertently saw Madeleine Lennox slipping into his cabin? This, she told herself hotly, had nothing to do with it, but the stupid fact remained there to taunt her.

She had found him attractive at first, with the homely male face, the assurance, and good manners, until she began to suspect this was all there was to him, that there was no warmth anywhere or capacity for feeling. She was sick to death of the hard, the smooth, and the impervious. They were too good at everything, and never seemed to have any doubts at all. Fear was alien to them because they were convinced they could, and nearly always did, walk away from the wreckage unscathed, while the involved, the less well-coordinated, and the earnest squares got their heads knocked off. And when, infrequently, one of the group did kill himself in the pursuit of kicks, the others bore it very lightly. Within a month after she’d watched in horror as Stacey fell from that sheer rock face in Yosemite, three of his very good, and very married, friends had made passes at her.

She was aware she was by no means unique in this; it probably happened to most widows and divorcees, but the callousness and the calm assumption they were doing her a favor had left her with what she felt was a permanent aversion to the breed. Too bad about old Stace, but they knew how rough it must be, and there was no sense in her wrecking her health. The fact that their marriage was already shaky and might have wound up in divorce hadn’t changed her reaction to these impervious but magnanimous studs who were willing to service her until she had made a permanent arrangement of some kind. And Goddard was another one, merely a few years older and hence a little smoother and more assured, and more immunized against the danger of ever feeling anything.

She dropped the book on the desk, and switched out the light. The fan droned on in its futile attempt to do anything about the heat. She felt very much alone and troubled, and it was a long time before she could get to sleep.

* * *

When Goddard awoke it was dawn and Madeleine Lennox was awake beside him, raised on one elbow to appraise the failure of her hand’s manipulation. Their eyes met. ‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?’ she asked. She smiled, kissed him softly on the check, and climbed naked from the bunk to gather up her pajamas.

When she went out, he stepped to the door and watched until she was inside her own cabin again. There was no one else in the passageway. He was just about to close the door when Barset appeared at the far end of it. He called out to ask how Captain Steen was.

Improving, Barset replied; resting much easier. Goddard closed the door and lit a cigarette, knowing Madeleine Lennox would have heard the good news too. Hell, there was nothing to worry about; it was all imagination.

10

In the pantry next door to the dining room Rafferty stirred the coffee again in the small pot to be sure the two tablets were dissolved. He glanced at his watch. It was seven twenty-five a.m.; ten minutes to go. He set the pot on a tray with the little pitcher of condensed milk and the sugar bowl, slipped on the white jacket with its exciting hard slab of weight in the right-hand pocket, and carried the tray down the passageway to Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. He knocked. ‘Coffee,’ he said.

‘Just a minute,’ she called out. There was the sound of the door’s being unlatched. He went in. She was sitting on the side of the bunk in pajamas, lighting a cigarette. She smiled. ‘You’re a little early this morning. Thank you, Dominick.’

‘Y’welcome,’ he said. He set the tray on the desk beside the bunk, and as he turned he took the usual good look down the open collar of the pajamas. She never seemed to get wise. Not a bad-looking pair of knockers, either, for an old biddy, and several times he’d been tempted to reach down and cop a handful, but you never knew. She might squawk. Not that he was afraid of Barset, but he didn’t want that big cold-eyed son of a bitch looking down his throat; he’d seen some of his work.

If he’d moved in soon enough he might have got some of it, he thought, stepping into the bathroom as though checking the towel supply and soap. Barset had beat him to it, though; he was pretty sure the scrawny bastard had been dipping his wick in it ever since they left Callao, and now it looked like Goddard-stein was having it delivered to his room. Out of sight, he whistled tunelessly, opened and closed the door of the medicine cabinet, and turned on a faucet momentarily. That Hollywood phony, who’d he think he was fooling, changing his name? The whole place was Jews and nigger-lovers, they ought to burn it down.

He came out. ‘I’ll bring you a couple of fresh towels,’ he said, looking around at her as he reached for the door.

‘Thank you.’ She tilted the pot to fill the cup again, and added some more sugar. He went out into the passageway. She hadn’t noticed a thing; that crappy condensed milk covered the taste of it all right. He stepped out on deck on the starboard side and looked forward. The bos’n and Otto and the other sailor were halfway down it now, coming this way as they washed down with the fire hose and brooms. Four minutes to go.

He stepped back into the passageway and went forward to the linen locker. He picked up two bath towels, came back, and knocked on the door of Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. Before he slipped in he shot a glance both ways along the passageway; nobody was in sight. She looked up and patted back a yawn. She smiled at him with a puzzled shake of the head, and said, ‘I feel so sleepy.’

‘It’s this heat,’ he said. ‘I better close your porthole; they’re washing down.’

He stepped past her, brushing her knees as she sat on the bunk, and leaned over the desk to dog down the porthole. The coffeepot and cup were both empty; she’d drunk it all. He turned and went into the bathroom, still carrying the towels.

Madeleine Lennox gazed dreamily after him and yawned again. Why, he didn’t look down my pajamas that time, she thought in wonder. After a beautifully planned and executed maneuver like that—God, what’s the matter with me, didn’t we sleep at all last night?—after that perfect down-range turn to come in over target at the precise angle to see clear to my navel, he didn’t even look. Could I have aged that much in five minutes?

She was conscious of a roaring sound that puzzled her for a moment; then she recognized it as the stream from the fire hose beating on the bulkhead of Harry’s cabin next door. But she still seemed to be floating off into a rosy cloud, and it was hard to focus or keep her thoughts straight. What was she thinking about? Oh, yes, the twilight of the boob. Her declining box-office. Somewhere between age thirteen, when they started trying to see up your dress, down your dress, or through your dress, and age ninety, when the show had been warehoused for years, there had to be some precise instant of time like the exact balancing point of a teeter-totter when they simply stopped peeking, once and forever. Like that. Was it possible she had pin-pointed this historic moment? Five minutes ago she could have sold advertising space on them, at least at sea—

There was a swishing sound of water along the deck outside, and then an even louder drumming as the stream from the fire hose beat on her own bulkhead and closed porthole. And coincident with this momentary din she saw Rafferty emerge from the bathroom. He had a towel in his right hand, and as he came toward her with his beefy grin he suddenly flipped the towel over into his left, and under it was a blue-black slab of metal which as the widow of a naval officer she could recognize as a sidearm even at the moment of dropping off to sleep like this. He raised it over her head, but there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.

Rafferty slashed downward with the .45, catching her just above the hairline on the left side of her head, the brutal impact lost under the beating of water against the bulkhead. As she pitched forward he caught her and stretched her out on the bunk with the towel under her head. Dropping the gun back in his pocket, he began yanking at the legs of the pajamas. Damn it, there must be a zipper somewhere. He located it at her left hip, stripped off the garment, and hurriedly unbuttoned the pajama top. Being careful to keep her head on the towel, he turned her face down, and peeled this garment off to complete undressing her.

Stacked, for an old dame. He squeezed an appreciative handful of buttock, and wished he had time to tear off a quickie, but he didn’t like the way that big bastard had looked when he’d told him just what would happen if he didn’t get out of here on schedule. He was taking enough chances carrying this gun, instead of the sap he was supposed to use.

He carried her into the bathroom and stretched her out under the shower. A trickle of blood ran out of her hair onto the tile. He came out, carefully checking the deck between bathroom and bunk. The bos’n and his fire hose were drawing farther away now, and he had to hurry. There were two or three drops of blood. Grabbing the already stained towel off the bunk, he wiped them up, and rolled the towel inside another.

In the bathroom again, he turned on the shower, letting it beat down on her, and dropped a bar of soap on the streaming tile beside her body. He stepped back, surveying the scene and nagged by a feeling there was something he hadn’t done, but it looked all right. She was wet all over, and the soap was there where she’d stepped on it and fallen. He shrugged and went out.

With the rolled towels under his arm, he opened the screen door and peered out into the passageway. No one was in sight. He stepped out quickly and strolled back to the pantry. Karl was in the dining room, setting up for breakfast. He shoved the towels into the bottom of a garbage can he was supposed to have emptied last night, and carried it aft, across the well-deck. The stink was everywhere this morning, and one of the deck apes was gawking up at the ventilators where you could see the smoke coming out. He pointed.

‘It’s burnin’ worse all the time.’

‘Good man,’ Rafferty said approvingly. ‘Give me a report every hour.’ What a clown, you’d think it was his cotton. He went up onto the poop to the fantail and emptied the can. Lighting a cigarette, he stared boredly aft as the two towels and the flotsam of garbage dropped back in the white water of the wake and disappeared. It was going to be another hot day.

* * *

Goddard showered at a quarter of eight, and as he turned off the water he could hear the shower running on the other side of the bulkhead in Mrs. Lennox’s bathroom. He was putting a new blade in the razor to shave when he became aware that the smell of burning cotton had now penetrated clear in here. Clad only in slacks and slippers, he went out on deck and walked aft in the lifeless heat. A squall was making up far off on the horizon to starboard, but what little breeze there was here came from almost directly astern, so there was little movement of air along the superstructure of the ship. Smoke was curling from both ventilators of number three hold, no longer in intermittent wisps but in a steady outpouring that drifted straight up in the brassy sunlight of early morning. A sheen, or haze, seemed to hang over the well-deck itself, and the odor was strong enough to irritate the throat. The Leander was in trouble that was growing worse by the hour.

He’d come aboard the ship in a rubber raft, and he wondered now if he were going to leave it in a lifeboat. If it did come to that, he reflected, he wasn’t going to be in great demand as an occupant of either boat. ‘No, you take the hard-luck bastard in that one. We don’t want him in here.’ Maybe you couldn’t blame them, at that; a murder, a suicide, a heart attack, and a fire, all in three days, might start a witch-hunt almost anywhere.

He went back and shaved. He had finished and was drying the razor when he became aware that Mrs. Lennox’ shower was still running. He grinned. She’d be a great asset on a small boat; she would have used up the Shoshone’s six weeks’ supply of water before breakfast the first morning. Well, it was one way to keep cool.

Karen Brooke was alone in the dining room when he went in a few minutes past eight. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress of almost the same shade of blue as her eyes, which in combination with the swirl of honey-colored hair seemed to intensify her tan.

‘You look very nice,’ he said.

She smiled, but her manner was cool and impersonal. ‘Thank you, Mr. Goddard. I consider that a real compliment, in view of the priority.’

‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘Lots of men would have said the ship’s afire, and then you look nice.’

‘Oh, there are clods like that.’ He sobered. ‘How long have you known it?’

‘Since yesterday. About the same time you asked me what the cargo was.’

‘But there’s still no official recognition?’

‘No. Mr. Lind hasn’t been down yet. But I suppose they’ve known it for the past few days. It might be what brought on Captain Steen’s heart attack, don’t you think?’

He nodded. ‘Anyway, he’s better this morning, according to Barset.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Karl came in. Goddard asked for a poached egg and some coffee. Karl poured the coffee and went back to the pantry. ‘Is all of number three loaded with cotton?’ Goddard asked. ‘Tween-decks too?’

‘No-o.’ She frowned, trying to remember. ‘They were just finishing loading when I came aboard, and it seems to me the tween-decks in that one is general cargo—cases of canned goods, leather, a lot of big carboys in crates, things like that.’

‘You don’t know what’s in the carboys?’

She nodded. ‘Alcohol.’

He said nothing, but it was obvious from her expression she knew as well as he did the potentialities of that combination— alcohol-saturated cotton—if those carboys started breaking in the heat down there.

Lind came in. He greeted them abstractedly, and it struck Goddard he came as near to looking troubled as he had ever seen him. Well, it might be understandable under the circumstances. When Karen asked how Captain Steen was doing, he shook his head and frowned.

‘I don’t know. I wish now I’d transferred him to the Kungsholm.’

‘Has he had another attack?’ Goddard asked.

‘No, not that. He rested quietly all night, and his pulse was all right. But the past hour he’s had more trouble breathing. And there may be some pulmonary edema—fluid in the lungs.’

‘Pneumonia?’ Goddard asked.

‘No. But it could be a symptom of congestive heart failure. Sparks is still in touch with the Public Health Service doctors, and we’ve got everything they recommend—but, I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ Karen said, ‘they wouldn’t have any more on the Kungsholm.’

‘Just one thing,’ Lind said bleakly. ‘A licensed doctor, instead of a ham-handed sailor.’ He shrugged then, and managed a wry grin, with a return of some of the old exuberance and self-confidence. ‘Oh, before I forget. We’re afire in number three hold. Not supposed to reveal things like that to you fluttery and hysterical passengers, but it’s getting a little like trying to hide an eight-month pregnancy.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’ Goddard asked.

‘We’re going to start throwing water in it as soon as we can get hoses down through the stuff in the tween-decks.’

‘Is there any chance of telling where the burning bales are?’

‘Not much. And if they’re very far down, it’ll be hard to get any water to them. But if we can wet enough of them on top maybe we can keep it under control.’ Lind drained his cup of coffee and got up without ordering breakfast. ‘You don’t know anybody who’s got a chicken farm for sale?’

He went out. Here we go again, Goddard thought. Will the real Eric Lind stand up? Wasn’t there any way you could arrive at some answer, some definite and final conclusion that would remain valid for at least an hour? Steen was better, so it was all a pipe dream, but now we’re prepared for the next bulletin that he’s dead. Or are we? He thought uneasily of Madeleine Lennox. No, she was all right. She was up; he’d heard her taking a shower.

Karen excused herself and left. He finished his poached egg and lit a cigarette while he drank another cup of coffee. When he went outside and walked aft, the bos’n and two sailors were knocking out the wedges that secured the tarpaulins on number three’s hatch cover. Smoke was filtering up here and there around the edges of it. Another man was unrolling a fire hose. He wondered if they had gas masks aboard; the smoke was going to be pretty bad down there.

He reached for a cigarette, but discovered the pack was empty. He tossed it over the side and went back to his cabin for another. As he was tearing the cellophane from it he was arrested by the faint sound issuing from the open door of his bathroom. He frowned, and stepped inside to be sure. The shower was still running in the one next door. After nearly forty-five minutes? He hurried out into the passageway.

Only the screen door was closed, and through it he could just hear the slight hissing of the water. He knocked. There was no answer, no sound of movement. Could she have gone off and forgotten it? He checked the dining room and the lounge and then the deck outside. She was nowhere around. Uneasy now, he came back and knocked again, and when there was still no response he stepped next door to Karen’s cabin and rapped. She looked out.

He explained quickly, and added, ‘I wonder if you’d look in and see if something’s happened to her.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She knocked on the door herself, and called out, ‘Madeleine.’ She went in. Almost immediately, Goddard heard her startled exclamation. ‘She’s lying under the shower! Wait’ll I get a sheet.’

He heard the shower stop, and then quick footsteps, Karen opened the screen door, her eyes frightened. He hurried into the bathroom. Madeleine Lennox lay almost face down on the tile in the open shower stall, a little stain of pink still spreading from the hair plastered wetly to her skull, and the sheet Karen had spread across her nude body was already soaked. Goddard rolled her over and raised her to a sitting position, wrapping the sheet about her as he gathered her up. Karen threw a towel across the pillow, and he laid her on the bunk.

He grabbed her wrist while Karen watched anxiously. ‘She’s alive,’ he said. The pulse was slow, but steady, and now they could see the rise and fall of her chest. ‘I’ll tell Barset to get Mr. Lind,’ Karen said. She hurried out.

Goddard stepped to the door of the bathroom and looked in. He saw the bar of soap lying on the tile, but it was two other things that caught and held his attention. One was the shower head itself; it was the same as the one in his bathroom, fixed, directly overhead, like those in any men’s locker room. The other item was the dry, unused shower cap hanging from a hook on the bulkhead. And the shower had come on during, or immediately after, all that din the bos’n was making with his fire hose at seven thirty. Well, he thought, you wanted to know. Now you do.

She’d been unconscious for nearly an hour, which meant that unless she’d been slugged hard enough for a genuine concussion she’d been given something to keep her under. He whirled and went back to the bunk. Sliding her arms from under the sheet, he examined both of them. There was no indication of puncture. He looked around then, and saw the tray with its coffeepot and cup on the desk. So it was given orally, beforehand. And the blow on the head was merely to provide a visible wound and some blood, another touch of artistry by the great master of illusion.

She would die without ever regaining consciousness, just as would Captain Steen—unless he was already dead. Lind would simply continue giving her enough morphine to keep her out for several days to simulate the coma from a severe concussion, and then inject the massive overdose that would kill her.

Well, he asked himself bleakly, was it abstract knowledge he’d been after, or did he intend to do something about it? Do what? Challenge Lind openly, tell him he knew the whole thing? What would that accomplish except to get him put on the list himself? Lind was the leader of the conspiracy, the ship’s doctor, and its acting master. Mount his soapbox and incite the rest of the crew to mutiny, not even knowing which ones he was talking to? That would be good for a laugh. Get a load of that goofy bastard; he’s not only a Jonah, but he hears voices.

Karen returned, but remained outside the door. There was the sound of hurrying footsteps along the passageway, and Lind came in. Barset appeared and passed in the first-aid kit. Goddard moved back. Lind checked her pulse, apparently with satisfaction, and raised one eyelid to look at the pupil. He had to wash his hands before he examined the wound, and as he scrubbed, Goddard told him how they’d come to find her.

Lind’s face was serious. ‘Hmmm. Unconscious for nearly an hour. She must have given herself a pretty good rap.’

You couldn’t fault the performance anywhere, Goddard thought as he watched. Lind shaved a small area around the scalp wound, sponged away the blood, and examined it. It wasn’t a bad cut, he announced; two stitches would close it. He probed with fingertips; the skull felt intact and certainly wasn’t depressed. Only an X-ray could tell whether or not there was a fracture, but he didn’t think there was. He cleaned the wound expertly with antiseptic, and put in the two stitches and added a small dressing. He checked her pulse again with a profound air, gently lowered the wrist, and radiated optimism. The great healer, Goddard thought.

So? So I open my stupid mouth, and I get killed too. And what good would it do her, except she’d have company on the bottom of the ocean? They might even sew us both in the same sack, if they’re running short of canvas.

And what was Madeleine Lennox to him anyway? He’d known her for three days, they’d had a couple of casual and utterly impersonal rolls in the hay, and once they’d reached Manila he’d never have seen her again anyway. He wasn’t involved any more; all he asked of the human race was to be left alone. That wasn’t an exorbitant demand, was it? All he had to do was mind his own business. And let her die.

He sighed then. It was a nice try, but, maybe he’d known it wouldn’t work. However he’d have to wait till he got Lind alone to heave it into the fan; he didn’t want to involve Karen in it.

‘Nothing more we can do at the moment,’ Lind said. 'I don’t know how bad the concussion is, but all we can do is wait till she comes around. I’ll look in on her every hour or so.’

‘Fine,’ Goddard said. ‘We’ll keep checking her too.’

Lind went out, carrying the first-aid kit. Barset sighed, shook his head in silent comment on this endless chain of disasters, and left. Karen watched them go down the passageway; then she stepped inside and closed the door. She took a cigarette from a pack on the desk, and leaned close as Goddard struck the lighter.

‘Well,’ she asked quietly, ‘how do we stop him?’

Goddard marveled at his own stupidity. If a man could figure out that she wouldn’t have been under the shower without her cap, washing her hair with a bar of soap instead of shampoo, twenty minutes before breakfast when it would take four hours to dry in this humidity, how had he expected another woman to fail to grasp it?

Before he could reply, the screen door swung open and Rafferty appeared, carrying a mop and a can of scouring powder. The beefy face was set in an expression of bland innocence and concern, which Goddard expected and dismissed, but there were two items he did find of more interest. One was the slight sag to the right-hand pocket of the jacket, and the other was a faint but undeniable thump of something inside the pocket as it brushed against the door facing.

‘Geez, I guess she really took a header, huh?’ Rafferty asked with a glance toward the unconscious figure on the bunk.

‘Yes, I guess she did, Rafferty,’ Goddard said pleasantly. We’re not in your way here?’

‘Naw, I’ll just crumb up the bathroom a little.’ He disappeared inside it.

Karen was watching Goddard in wonder. He had taken a handkerchief from his pocket and was winding it tightly about his right hand like a cestus, and the expression in his eyes was one she’d never seen before in those of a civilized man. There was something feral and wicked and almost hungry about them as he shook his head for silence and stepped casually over toward the doorway. He unhooked and closed the heavy wooden door and silently slid the bolt. The slapping sound of Rafferty’s mop continued inside the bathroom. Goddard stepped back and stationed himself beside its open doorway.

‘Look!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s coming around. Her eyes are open.’

For a moment it fooled even Karen. She jerked her head around to look at Madeleine Lennox, and by the time she’d turned back Rafferty was emerging from the bathroom door, his eyes turned in the same direction. Goddard stepped out in front of him and swung, from far down and way back, with no necessity for subtlety or feinting, feet planted and all his weight moving forward. The fist clenched into a bound and rock-hard projectile at the instant of impact and buried itself to the wrist in Rafferty’s unsuspecting belly.

Rafferty grunted and doubled over. Goddard caught a jacket lapel with his left hand, clawed him out of the doorway toward him, and shot the right again. It smashed into the side of Rafferty’s jaw just below and in front of the ear. The head weather-cocked with the force of it and he started to spin, went off balance, and crashed back against the heavy wooden door with his head and shoulders as he fell to the deck. Goddard leaped on him, landing with one knee in the belly and slashing the wrapped hand across his throat. Rafferty was a bull and not much more than twenty, and the inexorable law in this kind of thing was that if you were going to win it at forty-six you had to win it fast. The second round was doubtful, and there was never any third.

Rafferty gagged, but heaved upward under him, sheer strength pushing him off the deck. Goddard opened a cut above one eye, smashed him across the mouth, and pushed back, as though trying to hold him down. Rafferty was still scrambling up. Goddard suddenly removed his weight, came up with him, reached backward, got an arm around his neck, heaved forward, and threw him. Rafferty’s body cartwheeled and slammed into the bulkhead. He fell down it on his head and one shoulder, and sprawled, reaching for the gun in the pocket of his jacket. It came clear. Goddard stamped down on the wrist and ground his heel. The gun slipped from Rafferty’s fingers. Goddard grabbed it and slashed the barrel down across the side of his head hard enough to open the scalp. Rafferty pushed back against the bulkhead, dazed now, and tried to sit up. Blood ran down across his face.

Karen watched in horror. A face appeared momentarily at the closed porthole, and there were running footsteps on deck. Goddard jerked back the slide of the .45 to arm it. A cartridge jumped out, glinting as it spun across the deck. There was already one in the chamber. He shoved the slide back, slid off the safety, and pushed the muzzle against Rafferty’s teeth.

‘All right, you son of a bitch! What’d you give her, and how much?’

‘Up yours,’ Rafferty said, and then wished he hadn’t. Goddard grinned, and he’d never seen a face like that before. Goddard flicked on the safety, caught him by the shirt collar, leaned in on him, hard, and slashed his head again with the gun barrel.

‘You want to wear your scalp around your neck like a lei, go ahead,’ he said, fighting for breath. Somebody was hammering on the door. He raised the gun again.

‘Two tablets,’ Rafferty said.

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. He just give ‘em to me. He didn’t say what they was.’

Probably codeine, Goddard thought. But whatever it was, two couldn’t be any more than double a prescription dose and unlikely to be fatal.

‘Where’s Mayr?’ he asked.

‘Mayr? He’s dead and buried, you jerk.’ He looked at Goddard’s face, and at the gun, rising again. ‘All right, he’s down below somewhere. I don’t know where.’

‘How’s he supposed to get off the ship? And where?’

‘A boat, somewhere ahead of us.’

‘How far?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many are there besides Lind?’ ‘Otto, Sparks, Karl, Mueller—’ ‘Who’s Mueller?’

‘The bos’n.’

There were more people in the passageway now. Somebody was battering on the door with what sounded like a sledge. ‘And who else?’ Goddard asked.

‘One of the black gang, but I don’t know which one.’

‘Any more?’

'I don’t know. You think he tells me anything?’

‘You’re in it for the money, is that it?’

‘Partly.’

The bolt was beginning to tear out of the door. Rafferty looked at it. Help was coming. ‘What else?’ Goddard asked.

Rafferty spat in his face. ‘What do you think, Jew boy?’

'I see,’ Goddard said. ‘You’re dedicated.’ He wiped the spittle from his face. Without looking around, he spoke to Karen Brooke between crashes on the door. ‘Karen, see if you can find that cartridge; we’ve only got one clip. Stay close to me, and don’t let anybody get behind you.’

He stood up and gestured to Rafferty with the gun. ‘All right, save the hammering out there,’ he called through the door. ‘We’re coming out.’ He worked the bolt back and pulled the door open. The screen door had been torn from its hinges and was lying on deck. Otto was standing in front of it with the nozzle of a fire hose, Lind was beside him, and Karl was coming up the passageway behind them with a fire ax. Otto started to raise the nozzle until he saw the 0.45 dangling in Goddard’s hand.

Goddard shoved Rafferty out. ‘Here’s your boy,’ he said to Lind.

Lind nodded, but said nothing.

Goddard jerked his head at Otto. ‘Throw that thing forward, and go aft. You too, Karl.’

The nozzle and fire ax clanged on the deck. Goddard looked out and checked to his right. There was nobody in the passageway forward. He gestured for Lind and the other three to go on aft and out on deck, and followed close behind them with Karen on his heels. Barset was in the thwartships passageway near the entrance to the dining room, looking frightened.

‘Don’t get behind me,’ Goddard said. Barset turned and went the other way.

The four men went out on deck. Goddard checked to be sure they were all in view before he stepped out himself, followed by Karen. He moved to the right to get out from in front of the passageway. There was no breeze at all now and the sea was like polished metal. Just ahead and to starboard the sky was a poisonous mass of cloud veined with the nervous play of lightning. Thunder growled on the horizon, and the acrid odor of burning cotton stung his throat. Mueller, the bos’n, was running up the ladder from the deck below. Goddard gestured for him to stand clear, near the others, and spoke to Lind.

‘Where Mayr is, or what you’re going to do with him, I couldn’t care less. But I’m going to move Mrs. Lennox into my cabin, and Karen and I are going to be there with her from now on. I don’t know how many of your crew are in this, but I’ve got a blanket policy that covers it; anybody who tries to get in will be shot. We may not make it to Manila, but some of you won’t either.’

There were no threats, no bluster. Lind merely listened, and waited for him to finish. He turned to Rafferty then, and said quietly, 'I thought I told you not to carry that gun.’

Rafferty’s eyes were crawling with fear, but he tried to bluff it out. ‘Well, Chrissakes, we got plenty more—’

It was swift, deadly, and sickening. Lind made a quick movement of his hand. Rafferty threw up an arm. Lind caught it, twisted it behind his back, and ran him headfirst into the bulkhead. There was a meaty thud, and a grunt like that of a pole-axed steer. Lind picked him up by coat collar and crotch, stepped to the rail, and threw him overboard.

The whimpering little yunh-yunh-yunh-yunh he mouthed as he fell was cut off by the sound of the splash below them. Goddard winced. In spite of himself he turned and looked aft as Rafferty surfaced in the white water beyond the line of the poop and began to drop astern, his mouth open in a soundless scream and his arms flailing as he tried to swim after the ship like a dog chasing a car.

‘Oh, God!’ Karen cried out in a strangled voice beside him. She ran to the rail and gagged. Goddard raised the gun, but it was too late; Lind had already leaped and caught her. With his left arm about her waist, he swung her up over the rail as if to throw her into the sea. He caught a handful of her skirt and slip with his right hand and let her dangle over the rushing water below as the garments slid up under her arms. The slender body writhed as she struggled, face outward, trying to turn inward and grab the stanchion. Braced against the rail and holding her out behind him, Lind turned and looked at Goddard. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘toss Otto the gun.’

Goddard heard a brief, blood-freezing sound of seams beginning to tear. He tossed the gun to Otto. At the same time a voice in the after well-deck shouted, ‘Mayr!’ Lind turned and looked.

There was another ripping sound. ‘Get her up!’ Goddard shouted. He lunged for the rail. There was no way to tell whether Lind tried to lift her back or not. The dress tore away, she slid out of the half slip, and Goddard saw her body drop feet-first into the sea.

In the madness then, he didn’t know who hit him first. A fist crashed against his jaw. He reeled backward, swung at one of the faces boring in, and then he was down as they swarmed him under. He got a knee into somebody’s groin, smashed another in the face and managed to fight his way momentarily to his feet, trying to get to Lind. As he went down the second time, he saw Mayr running up the ladder just beyond him, carrying a machine pistol.

Somebody got a clear swing at his face, knocking his head back against the deck. The barrel of the .45 chopped downward. He could see it, but there was no way to avoid it. They heaved him up, dazed but still conscious, and threw him over the rail. He was turning as he fell, and he saw the sky wheel above him, and the far line of the horizon, and then the water rushing up.

11

The impact was numbing, and he was close to blacking out as he went under. The urge to fight his way upward and try to keep from being drawn into the wheel was instinctive—and admittedly irrational if he’d had time to think about it. The quick and sensible way would be to go on through the propeller and emerge in slices. But there was little danger of it with the ship loaded; the propeller was too far down. Then, slammed back and forth in the millrace of its turbulence and whirled and spun around by blows from water as solid as oak, he lost all sense of direction and had no idea which way was up anyway. His lungs were bursting and he was drifting off into a darkening winy haze when he came out on top, kicked to the surface by the violence itself. The counter loomed black and massive above him, drawing rapidly away to the thumping beat of the propeller. He was whirled again and kicked backward in the foaming water of the wake.

Blind panic seized him for a moment, and he had already taken two or three frenzied strokes after the ship before he got it under control. He didn’t know whether it was his hatred of Lind and contempt for Rafferty, or whether he was still partially immunized by the massive charges of adrenaline, but he was able to stop the ludicrous flailing of his arms. No doubt he would panic at the end or go completely out of his mind when he saw the ship go over the horizon, but at least he could do it in private. He treaded water instead, and turned to search the sea behind him. There wasn’t much chance he would see her, though, even if she were still afloat. She would be several hundred yards astern, only a head showing above the surface and still below the intervening billows of the swell. Only, he thought, if they both rose to a crest at the same time.

He was still being thrown about in the diminishing turbulence of the wake, and now he was facing toward the ship again. He stared unbelievingly. It was well over a hundred yards away, but it was beginning to swing in a hard-over turn to port, and he could see two figures out on the port wing of the bridge, undeniably looking back at him. Gooseflesh spread between his shoulder blades, but he killed the cruel surge of hope before it had time to start. It was only somebody who hadn’t heard the word. Then he saw the big figure that could only be Eric Lind, running up the ladder to the boat deck. The word was on its way.

* * *

Antonio Gutierrez, the Filipino messman, had just emerged from the passageway at the after end of the crew’s deck when he thought he heard something splash in the water on the starboard side. He walked over and looked down, but could see nothing; Rafferty was a hundred feet aft by that time and still below the surface. He looked off momentarily toward the squall, and was about to turn away when a gilt sandal fell past his face, followed by another, and then a long and very beautiful pair of legs dropped into view and stopped, suspended in front of his eyes so near he could have touched them if he had been capable of movement.

Apparently performing some sort of airy dance to unheard music, they were slender and tanned, and nude all the way to the fragment of white nylon at their juncture, and could belong only to the pretty blonde one he had embraced so often in the fantasies of his nights. He heard voices on the deck above him then, a shout, and a sound of tearing cloth, and she dropped past him and fell into the sea. There were more sounds from above, and then a cry in the well-deck below. He drew a shaking hand across his face and looked down to see a tall figure running toward the ladder, carrying some kind of strange pistol in his hand. It was the dead man they had buried two days ago.

Harald Svedberg, the young third mate, didn’t know a word of Spanish or Tagalog, and even if he had it is doubtful he would have made any sense of the chaotic outpouring about dancing legs and ghosts with pistols and naked women falling so close you could reach out like that and touch them, but there is something universally compelling about the pointed finger, even that of an obvious madman. The eye follows involuntarily. He looked aft in the direction indicated by the stabbing and palsied hand and saw Goddard’s head in the white water of the wake.

‘Hard left!’ he called out to the helmsman. He lifted the life ring from its bracket on the port wing of the bridge, yanked loose the canister, and threw them outward.

* * *

Goddard saw the ship steady up from her turn to port and then begin to swing back to starboard, as he had known she would as soon as Lind had reached the bridge. Almost at the same time he spotted the white circle of the life ring as it rose to the crest of a swell ahead of him, its attached flare glowing feebly in the sunlight.

Kicking off his slippers, he began to swim toward it. When he had reached it, the Leander had steadied up again and was back on course, going straight away from him a quarter mile ahead, trailing a plume of smoke from her ventilators as she headed into the dark line of the rain squall beyond. He tore his eyes from her, took the knife from his pocket, and cut loose the canister and its flare. Letting the knife drop, he tore off the shirt and the encumbering flannel slacks.

From here, where the Leander had started her first turn, the wake ran straight back, traces of it still visible for several hundred yards. With no conscious thought as to why he was doing it, he slipped inside the ring, pushed straight down on it with both hands to give himself all the buoyancy possible, and raised his head as high as he could to look back along the line of the wake. He was lifted by a gentle swell, and then another, and it was while the third was passing under him that he was sure he saw her, a golden dot in the immensity of blue behind him. He dropped away down the slope and began to rise again, and this time there was no doubt. He marked her position against the edge of a cloud formation beyond, and began to swim back to her, towing the life ring.

It was slow work, but he had covered what he thought must be half the distance and had paused momentarily to hold onto the ring and rest when the question finally occurred to him. In the name of God, why? Wasn’t it more merciful to let her drown? Unconsciousness came in probably less than a minute, and then it was over. Wasn’t that better than four or five days, and ultimate madness and death by thirst?

He looked around then, and the Leander was gone, swallowed up in the squall, and he was only a speck in all this vast and aching void. He began kicking ahead, hurrying now, driven by fear that he might be too late. Each time he rose to the crest of a swell he looked anxiously ahead in the direction she had to be. Then he saw her. She rose to the top of a swell less than fifty yards away, only the back of her head visible above the surface.

She disappeared, and looked as though she had gone under. No, she’d probably just dropped away behind the swell. He threshed ahead. He saw her again, closer now, but she was in trouble. She went under, and he could see her struggling weakly. A hand came out. Then her face emerged for a few seconds. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth opened as she tried to gulp for air, water ran into it, and she sank from sight. She didn’t come up again. He was still twenty yards away.

Gasping for breath himself and driven by the awful compulsion to hurry, he tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot as he flailed ahead, but it was next to impossible in the tilting planes of the swell. He was above it, then cut off from it, and then below it. The sun was in his face, glaring off the surface and making it impossible to see beneath. The only thing to do was go beyond, and turn, with the sun over his shoulder so he could see down. He should be over it now. He lunged on for a few more strokes, and swung around, searching frantically. It might already be too late.

Luck was with him; he saw her almost at once. A swell passed under him, and with the sun’s rays striking almost perpendicularly into the plane of its retreating slope, it was like looking into a shop window. A flash of gold caught the corner of his eye off to the right, and he turned, and she was only three or four feet below the surface less than ten feet away. He swam over and dived, twined his fingers in the aureole of blonde hair streaming outward from her head, and kicked to the surface.

Her eyes were closed, and there was no responsive movement from her body, no attempt to clutch at him at all as he held her against him with her face above the surface. How did he get the water out of her when they were both immersed in it to their chins, with no way to raise her above it? Maybe if he lay flat with the life ring under his back he would have enough buoyancy. When he was positioned, he hauled her body over his and pushed up hard into her midriff, but before her face could clear the water they both went under.

That was hopeless, and he had wasted precious seconds. He threw one leg over the rim of the life ring and stood vertically in the water astride it. It supported them with no need to tread water when he took her in his arms and held her upright against him. He brushed back the wet hair plastered to her face. Taking a deep breath, he forced her mouth open, placed his over it, and blew. He pressed in hard on her ribs to force her to exhale.

He took another breath and blew it into her lungs, and repeated the cycle. Twice, three times, four times. He was doing it too fast, driven by the frantic need to sense in her some sign of returning life. Slow down, damn it, he told himself harshly; it has to be the same rhythm as natural breathing. Keep going. She’s not dead. She can’t be. Please, she can’t be.

He looked around at the numbing emptiness of the horizon and wondered if he were already mad. So after he had revived her, they’d have a scared and shaky laugh at what a close call it had been, get in the car, and drive home. Why the hell couldn’t he leave her alone? She was free, already beyond the agony and the consciousness of dying; why condemn her to go through it again? He didn’t know. She just had to open her eyes.

He had his lips against hers, blowing inward, when he felt her move. There was a little shudder, and a gasp, and a hand brushed against his side. He pressed, and she exhaled, and when he started to force breath into her again, her rhythm caught and she inhaled herself. He was suddenly aware then of the intimacy of the way he was holding her, as if they were kissing or making love, with his mouth over hers and her breasts pressed tightly against his chest. The bra had gone, apparently ripped away by the force of her plunge feet-first into the water or when she was whirled through the maelstrom of the wake.

He cursed himself for a voyeur and a ghoul, but he was aware at the same time there was nothing erotic about it; he just wanted her to open her eyes. When she did, and saw him, and said something, he would no longer be alone. Admittedly, this made no sense, but as far as he could see that was why he’d come back here. He freed the life ring, put it over her and under her arms, and held an arm across it behind her to keep her in it and to support himself. She gagged and retched and was briefly sick from the salt water she had swallowed. He washed her lips and continued to hold her while her breathing became stronger, and in a moment she opened her eyes.

There was no comprehension in them at first. She looked blankly at him, and then around at the lonely expanse of sea and the squall bearing down on them. He expected her to cry out, or become hysterical, or faint, but she didn’t. Perhaps it couldn’t penetrate fast enough to slug you all at once. She turned her eyes back to his face, still seeming more bewildered than anything. ‘You—’ She gagged, and tried again. ‘You didn’t jump in—after me?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘They threw me over.’ He explained briefly how he happened to have the life ring. She said nothing. Her chin trembled for a moment, and he could sense her struggle for control.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘No.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘It was my fault. If I’d stayed behind you—’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ His gesture included them and all the empty sea. ‘You had it made, if I’d left you alone.’

‘Oh. You’re apologizing for saving my life?’

‘Saving?’

‘Well, all it ever is is a postponement.’ She choked, and began to cough. ‘And the ship might come back if the others know about it.’

‘The others haven’t got guns,’ Goddard said. He told her of Mayr’s running out into the well-deck. ‘Either the smoke drove him out or they’d already moved him to another hiding place and somebody discovered him.’

‘Well, it’s failed now. Everybody knows he’s still alive. What can Lind do?’

'I don’t know,’ Goddard said. The thing that baffled him was that Lind could have saved himself any time in the past two days if he’d wanted to, simply by getting rid of Mayr. He’d apparently sacrificed Krasicki without a qualm; why not Mayr too? When he saw the illusion was coming apart at the seams and they were all going to be exposed it would seem the simplest way out, for a man as ruthless as Lind, would be to destroy the evidence. Instead, he had gone on in his futile and dangerous attempts to shore up the dike by getting rid of Captain Steen and Mrs. Lennox. Discipline? Ideological fanaticism? That made no sense. Of what value was Mayr to any resurgence of Naziism? He couldn’t surface anywhere on earth without being arrested, and he was the symbol of nothing but butchery and final defeat. But still Lind was apparently willing to destroy the whole crew if he had to in order to pull it off.

Thunder crashed, nearer now, and erratic puffs of wind began to riffle the surface of the swell. To the north and west the sky was blotted out, and the impenetrable curtain of rain swept down toward them only a few hundred yards away. Suddenly Karen cried out, ‘Look!’

Goddard turned and stared. Less than a half mile to the west of them the Leander had emerged from the gray line of rain. A towering column of smoke poured up from her after well-deck, shot through with red tongues of flame to the height of her stack. The fire had burst out of number three hold at last. She seemed to be on a southerly heading, but before he could be sure, the squall engulfed them and she was blotted out.

* * *

Antonio Gutierrez crossed himself, but seemed to be incapable of any further movement. He had never been on the bridge of a ship before and he wished devoutly that he had never seen this one, but if he moved somebody might notice him. He was no longer sure any of this was really happening, anyway; his belief in his own sanity already shaken by the resurrection of a dead man, he was now confronted with the fact that he had seen a woman with long blonde hair fall overboard but when he’d told the officer and pointed, what they had seen emerge from the foamy water back there was a man’s head with short black hair. Fortunately, the officer hadn’t seemed to notice this discrepancy in his story; he had told the steering man to turn the ship around and had thrown over the salvavida, but now the big first officer was striding through the wheelhouse toward them. Somebody had said he was now the captain, and his eyes were very cold and mean.

The ship had already started her swing and Harald Svedberg was staring aft, trying to determine whether the man in the water had seen the life ring fall, when he looked around and saw Lind coming through the wheelhouse.

‘Mr. Svedberg!’ Lind snapped. ‘Back on your course!’

‘There’s a man overboard,’ the third mate started to explain, when Lind cut him off.

'I said back on your course!’ Lind turned to the helmsman. ‘Hard right.’

The helmsman, a Greek ordinary seaman, glanced with momentary helplessness toward the third mate at this conflict of orders, and then began spinning the wheel back to the right. There was no arguing with that tone of voice, not from Lind.

‘Mr. Lind! I tell you there’s a man in the water back there!’ the third mate said angrily. Lind might be the acting master, but this was his watch and he’d give the orders on it. He strode to the door of the wheelhouse. ‘I saw him myself.’

The third mate’s protest cut off then. He started. Hugo Mayr, now minus the eye patch, the beard-stubbled face wearing a chill smile, had just entered the opposite door of the wheelhouse carrying a machine pistol. Behind him was Karl with a Luger in his hand. The helmsman looked around at them, and his eyes grew wide with fear. The ship was swinging hard to starboard now and the squall was bearing down on them from dead ahead.

Antonio Gutierrez, still frozen into immobility out on the wing of the bridge, saw the big sailor called Otto come up across the port side of the boat deck, also carrying a black slab of a pistol. He stepped onto the bridge behind the third mate, looked beyond him to Lind standing in back of the helmsman, and nodded. He raised the pistol and slashed it down on the third mate’s head. Svedberg’s knees buckled. He fell forward against the door facing and slid to the deck just as the advancing curtain of rain swept down on them. Otto caught him by the arm and started to drag his body to the wing of the bridge where Gutierrez was still cowering.

‘Ease your helm!’ Lind snapped to the young Greek. The latter, still petrified, gave no indication he had ever heard. Lind yanked him away from the wheel and flung him toward the door. He fell to his hands and knees on the bridge in the gusts of windswept rain, scrambled to his feet, and fled. ‘Otto, take the wheel,’ Lind ordered. Otto left the unconscious third mate lying in the rain and hurried in. Lind gave him the course. He spun the wheel left to steady up.

Lind turned to Mayr and started to say something in German just as the bos’n hurried in. Water streamed down his face, and he had a Luger shoved into the waistband of his dungarees.

He spoke rapidly to Lind. ‘Those carboys are breaking in number three. Before the squall hit, you could smell alcohol all over the well-deck.’

Lind nodded. ‘Nothing we can do about it. If it blows, maybe we can keep it under control. Where’s Sparks?’

‘He’s coming.’

‘Good. Cover the ladders. Shoot anybody who tries to get up here.’

The bos’n went out into the gray confusion of wind and rain. Sparks came up the inside companion way through the chart room. ‘Call the Phoenix,’ Lind ordered. ‘Tell them to get under way on our reciprocal course at full speed. Give him a signal once an hour to home on with his RDF.’

Sparks looked questioning. ‘Won’t we rendezvous before dark?’

‘What difference does it make now?’ Mayr asked. ‘We all board her,’ Lind said.

‘And what about—?’ Sparks’ gesture was inclusive—the ship and the rest of the crew. Lind drew a finger across his throat. Sparks nodded and went out.

The third mate still lay face down where Otto had left him, almost at Gutierrez’ feet. His sodden cap was nearby, blown against the canvas dodger by the buffeting gusts of wind, and a pink stain ran out of his hair across the deck that streamed with water. The messman looked down at this man he assumed was dead, and then through the flung sheets of rain at the others inside the wheelhouse. Maybe they wouldn’t notice him now if he moved. He had taken one step when there was a sound like a gigantic exhalation of breath that made his ears pop. He turned.

Numb by now and beyond any emotion, he watched in a sort of bemused wonder as a great ball of fire and smoke shot skyward from the after well-deck, carrying with it the cartwheeling planks and flaming sections of tarpaulin from number three hatch cover, shattered and burning cases, baled cowhides, splintered dunnage, and an eruption of sparks like the climax of a fireworks display.

This fiery debris began to rain down on the poop and into the sea alongside to die a hissing death in the water above and below, but the column of flame continued to mount, shooting up from the hatch to the height of the stack and giving off boiling clouds of smoke and a rushing and crackling sound that could be heard above the lashing of rain and the shouts of men on the decks below. Lind ran out onto the starboard wing of the bridge, looked aft, and strode back to grab up the telephone on the bulkhead behind the helmsman.

‘Give us pressure on the fire line,’ he barked. He threw the phone back on the hook, rang the engine room telegraph to STOP, and ran back across the boat deck, followed by the others. With no one on the bridge except an unconscious third officer and a Filipino messman, the Leander continued blindly ahead into the squall.

Gutierrez stepped to the wheelhouse door and looked in, his face still suffused with wonder. The pretty blonde one was back there somewhere, and if they returned there was no doubt she would simply come aboard again. Perhaps not even wet. How was it the steering man had started to perform the return? This way? Yes, a la izquierda, without doubt. He grasped the spokes of the wheel and began turning it to the left. When it would go no farther, he left it, dragged the third mate inside out of the rain where he might await resurrection in more comfort, and went out onto the boat deck to watch the fire. On any other ship, a thing like that would be very unusual and frightening.

The Leander, her engine stopped but with full way on her and still plowing ahead at nearly twelve knots, began a hard-over turn to port through the opaque and wind-lashed sheets of rain where one direction was like another.

* * *

In a violent gray world less than a hundred yards across, they floated face to face with the rim of the life ring between them, eyes half closed against the beating of the rain. Thunder exploded on the heels of a jagged flash of lightning.

‘Why do you suppose she was going that way?’ Karen asked. ‘They couldn’t be looking for us?’

‘No,’ Goddard said. It was brutal, but raising false hopes was even more so. Lind would still be in command, even now that she was afire; there were at least six of them, and they’d all be armed. ‘She could be out of control, or they changed course to keep the fire off the midships house.’

‘Well, they couldn’t find us, anyway. You can’t see fifty yards.’

‘Did you ever see anything of Rafferty?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She wiped water from her face, and shivered. ‘Why do you suppose he did it? One of his own men?’

‘Rafferty was stupid. Lind would probably have killed him later, anyway. I mean, if the thing had worked. They’d never trust a secret like that to some two-bit punk who’d spill it in the first bar he hit.’

There was also a good chance Lind had done it with the knowledge her reaction would be just what it had been, to get her to the rail, but he saw no point in saying so.

‘Do you suppose he was a Nazi too? An American?’

‘Probably,’ Goddard said.

The squall was kicking up a sharp and confused sea atop the swell. Spray blew off it to mingle with the rain. There was so much water in the air that breathing was difficult.

‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘but I don’t even know if you have any family or not.’

‘A brother in Texas,’ he replied. ‘And an ex-Mrs. Goddard, somewhere in Europe. We communicate through a power of attorney and a bank account; if the dollar holds firm, it’ll be years before she hears about this.’

‘You didn’t have any children?’

‘A daughter,’ he said, ‘by a previous marriage. She was killed in a car crash.’ Then he was surprised. Had he really said that?

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was five months ago.’

Why? he wondered. Was it the imminence of death, or some latent tendency to spill himself he’d never suspected before, just waiting for a captive audience with no bra to get in the way? Since he’d walked away from the hospital that afternoon in his private and invisible bubble he’d never said anything to anybody except to call Suzanne and tell her that Gerry was dead, he would be home in three hours, and not to be there.

People had asked occasionally, and he’d said he had no children. Once or twice during that marathon drunk some more convivial and inquisitive type had forgotten and asked the question twice, to receive a brief smile that left him with an impression his martini was freezing to a lump of solid ice in his hand. Well, yes, I did have a daughter, but her stepmother and I killed her. How about a refill?

Her arms looked very soft and round on the rim of the life ring. Somehow he wanted to touch them. Water coursed down her face.

‘Did you have any?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Then, without knowing why, she added, 'I had abortions instead. Two of them.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They were induced. My husband didn’t want children.’

‘I’m not a professional Angeleno,’ Goddard said, ‘but don’t they have the pill in San Francisco?’

‘They were still experimental then.’ She said nothing else. Well, it was an unlikely place to hold a seminar on planned parenthood. But at least neither of them had anybody else to worry about, and if they didn’t start slopping over about each other— So why had he come back here? He didn’t know.

‘I’m sorry I said that,’ he apologized. ‘It must have been left over from some cocktail party. And God damn your husband.’

She gave him a strange look, but said nothing. That was understandable, however; he wasn’t making sense even to himself. If he wanted to stamp his foot and stick out his tongue at somebody, why not Lind, instead of some anonymous dead man?

'I mean, it’s degrading,’ he said, still floundering. ‘For Christ’s sake. I don’t know what I mean.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. 'I don’t even know why I said it.’

We gotta do something with this scene, fellas; it’s fuzzy as hell and the dialogue stinks. Maybe what the script meant was our boy Shrdlu—we got to find a better name for him, let’s make a note of that—Shrdlu is about to buy the John Donne bit, only he’s still all futzed up with his old behavior patterns. This babe is now the whole human race—I buy that—she’s Everybabe, mother, sex object, sufferings, boobs, and all, and he feels the old tidal pull. He wants to tell her he’s sorry, or buy her a chocolate Easter egg, but the best he can do is get mad because she was married to some guy thinks a pregnancy is a clogged drain, you send for a plumber.

There was a simultaneous flash of lightning and a crackling explosion of thunder. Water beat at his face. And after the squall would come the agony of the sun. I’m not so sure, Mannie; this is just off the top of my head, but I think what it is with Shrdlu is he’s scared spitless.

* * *

Gerry hadn’t entirely given up on the over-twenty-five generation; there was still hope even if a good many of them did seem to have the moral outlook of howler monkeys. The Haight-Ashbury routine wasn’t for her, with its promiscuity and pot; she was at UCLA, fulminating against Rusk and the CIA and Dow Chemical recruiters, even if it was her opinion that blaming the latter for napalm was about as logical as crusading against fever because it sometimes killed people with malaria. You were still only treating the symptoms.

He didn’t know what she’d come home for that afternoon. He’d come back from the studio for some notes he’d forgotten that morning in regard to the third cut they were taking at The Salty Six in a last desperate attempt to save what everybody was already calling ‘a real nice picture, Harry.’

The studio had served notice they were going to drop his option, but that wasn’t what was riding him; he was pretty well fixed financially. It was simply the failure. The picture was a bomb, and it was his baby from beginning to end; he’d written the script and produced it. On the surface it would seem to be a good comedy situation, the misadventures of a sailing yacht in mid-ocean with a male captain and a five-girl crew, but when it was in the can there wasn’t a belly laugh in it. He should have known to begin with that there weren’t five good comediennes in the industry, that if there were they wouldn’t work together, and that, finally, with all five of them in full cry after the one male within two thousand miles and he the Godhead, Authority, the Captain, nothing in Christ’s world, script, director, or threat of death, was going to make them be funny; they were going to be sexy. He had a headache, which he’d had almost a month ago, and no amount of Miltown could any longer retract and sheathe his nerve-ends.

Gerry was living on campus, when she wasn’t working in Watts or picketing an induction center somewhere, so she didn’t know yet how near he and Suzanne were to calling it quits. Not, he thought, that he’d known it had gone that sour, until he got to the house. There was a strange car in the driveway, but he didn’t pay any attention to it; it was just one of Suzanne’s friends. He went in through the front and back to the den, but he couldn’t find the notes. Maybe she’d know where they were; she was probably out by the pool. He went out through the sliding glass door of the living room, apparently just ahead of Gerry. He hadn’t heard the Porsche pull into the driveway, so it must have been while he was in the den.

He didn’t see Suzanne, but the shallow end of the pool was around the corner of the master bedroom. He stepped around it and almost onto two nude bodies on the poolside mattress with the wet trunks and swimsuit discarded beside it, Suzanne in an equestrienne attitude with her eyes closed and beyond hearing anything less than an amphibious assault, the recumbent one a posturing and epicene writer named Ransome he’d always assumed was a fag. Ransome’s eyes were open, looking up at him; they kept growing wider in horror as he made a strangled sound and fought to escape, both of which could have been interpreted as ardor until at last his voice returned and he wailed, ‘Oh, good heavens!’ Suzanne’s eyes opened and she looked around at him with the blank stare of someone in a trance. It hadn’t been more than two seconds.

In spite of the roaring in his head, his voice seemed to be perfectly matter of fact. 'I don’t care if you lay this double-gaited son of a bitch,’ he said, ‘but could you do it somewhere else? I’d like to think the pool’s exclusive, anyway.’

There was a gasp behind them then. He whirled, and Gerry was staring at all three of them, her eyes sick with loathing. She turned and ran. There was a snarl from the Porsche out in the driveway, a scream of rubber, and she was gone.

There was no use trying to catch her; he’d just have to keep calling her at the dormitory tonight until he could get her to come to the phone. Maybe he could make her understand he’d been operating in shock himself. He went back to the studio, and was in one of the projection rooms two hours later when the call came from the California highway patrol. She’d spun out through a guardrail on the San Diego Freeway.

Afterwards, when he walked away from the hospital isolated from everything in his private world of silence, all he had to hang onto was the knowledge she hadn’t done it deliberately; she was too healthy-minded and vital for that. She was just burning out her anger and disgust by driving too fast, a kid hitting back blindly at the only things available at the moment, the throttle of an overpowered car and the speed laws promulgated by the same can of worms.

* * *

It was a lovely face, he thought, with magnificent bone structure, and he was conscious of a desire to tell her this, but she was probably already convinced he was some kind of nut. He was appraising the exquisite effect of that slight tilt to the eyes when a little black streak trickled briefly down her cheek like running mascara and then disappeared under the pelting of the rain. Now another oozed from the blond hair plastered to her head. He was wondering at this when she said, ‘There’s soot or something in the rain. It’s on your face.’

The ship, of course! It was the fallout from the fire. He swung his head, searching the limits of the rain-swept void around them, but could see nothing except the short and choppy sea fading away into the murk. In the squall it could be blown for miles. But there was more of it now. Sooty splotches were dotting her arms. It had to be nearby. He turned, eyes slitted against the spindrift and rain, and stared directly to windward. Then he saw it—not the ship itself, but a faint and shapeless wash of orange glowing through the gray. He spun Karen around and pointed.

There was no way to tell how far away she was or in what direction she was going. It was simply a color without form or dimension, and they had no framework or orientation except the wind, which could be veering all around the compass. But it was growing brighter, he thought, conscious of the pounding of his heart.

Then they could see the flames and the dark clouds of smoke, and the side of the ship began to materialize in the mists at the limit of visibility. It was in profile, going past them very slowly with scarcely any disturbance to the swell or the confused and choppy sea set up by the squall.

‘The engine’s stopped!’ Goddard said. ‘And she’s lost most of her headway.’

Karen slipped out of the life ring. They each hooked an arm through it and began to kick in the direction of the ship. She was fading from view into the curtain again, off to their right, but the glow was still visible and he knew she was slowing all the time.

12

They must be almost there, Antonio Gutierrez thought; he should see the pretty blonde one any minute now. One could see the ship was stopping, just as it had when they had gone back to pick up the big American on his rubber raft. The engine room telegraph meant nothing to him, and he had no way of knowing the Leander had been moving through the water only from her own headway ever since Lind and the others had run from the bridge.

But it was very difficult to see anything in all this rain, and to make it worse nobody even appeared to be watching for her. The officer still lay where he’d left him in the house where the wheel was, and on the decks below everybody was shouting and running around dragging hoses as they shot streams of water into the fire which still roared and threw flames as high as the stack. He himself had started to leave the boat deck once, before they discovered him up here where he had no business, but the men with guns were around the ladder below him, with no way for him to get past them unnoticed, so he had remained. His white jacket and trousers were drowned, and water ran out of his hair and down into his eyes. But since he was the only one watching, he would continue to watch.

He went over to the rail between the starboard lifeboats and looked down. She wasn’t there, but he could see that the ship was barely moving now. He searched the surface as far out as he could see through the blown curtains of rain. Nada. He went over to the portside and peered outward and then down. Truly, they had not yet reached her. He went back to the door of the wheelhouse and looked in. The officer was trying to sit up. He was very weak and holding his head with the dolor, and a little stream of blood ran down across his face.

* * *

It was agonizingly slow and exhausting, trying to make any headway against the wind and the steep-sided chop it was kicking up into their faces, and they’d had to stop several times and rest. Goddard didn’t know how long they’d been struggling after the orange glow in the rain, dragging the life ring. They’d almost lost it at first. It had faded until they could scarcely see it, but the ship had lost way rapidly as she continued to turn and had finally come head up into the wind and sea. She was dead in the water now, directly ahead. The dark shape of the counter materialized below the column of flame. In a few minutes they were under it. They looked up at the railing of the poop far above them, and then at each other in mutual admission of what they’d both known all along. When they did reach her, there was no way to get aboard.

To call out would be to attract the attention of Lind or one of his men. They’d simply be shot in the water, or ignored, to be left there when the ship got under way again. If she did, Goddard thought, looking up at the tower of flame and smoke blown back across the poop by the force of the squall. If they didn’t get the fire under control very soon, the Leander was doomed.

Lind and the bos’n would be back here directing the fight, so their best chance of attracting the attention of someone else would be to go forward. He gestured to Karen, and they began kicking ahead along the black steel cliff of her starboard side. They could hear shouted orders and the roaring of the fire, but no one appeared at the bulwark above them. They passed the well-deck, and were below the midships house.

* * *

Harald Svedberg climbed unsteadily to his feet, assisted by Gutierrez. He was nauseated, his head was splitting, and when he put a hand to his face, it came away with blood on it. The ship was stopped, he noted, they were still enveloped in the opaque fury of the squall, and there was nobody else on the bridge except this waterlogged and obviously insane Filipino messman who appeared to have taken up residence on it. There was a roaring sound in his ears, which he took to be part of the headache until he became aware the messman was speaking English now and was saying something about a fire. He made it to the door of the wheelhouse and looked aft, and the whole picture clarified itself then as he remembered Mayr and that other messman with their guns. Lind had taken over the ship, that man he’d seen back there in the wake had probably been thrown overboard, and now they were all fighting the fire.

Their only hope was that Captain Steen was still alive and that he might have a weapon of some kind. He went in through the office to the captain’s stateroom. The improvised oxygen tent was gone now, but Steen still lay on the bunk in the same position he’d been in last night, and his eyes were closed. Svedberg grabbed a wrist. The flesh was warm, and after several hurried and fumbling attempts he located a pulse. Steen was alive, and still the legal master of the ship, whether drugged or not. It seemed unlikely that a man of his devout religious beliefs would own a gun, but captains quite often did, and a forlorn hope was better than none. He began yanking open drawers under the bunk, and then the desk, conscious of the ominous sound the fire was making and the fact that he had no idea how many of the crew were involved in this with Lind. He moved out into the office and began hurriedly ransacking the desk there. Then the crazy messman, dripping water like a sponge, ran in from the starboard wing of the bridge.

‘We have arrived,’ he said, pointing outward. ‘She is right there.’

Svedberg pulled open another drawer and began scattering its contents, paying no attention.

‘The man we saw too,’ Gutierrez said. ‘It is the big American.’

What in the hell was he talking about, anyway? If the skipper had a gun, it must be in the safe—Svedberg’s head jerked around then. ‘What?’

‘The people who fell into the water.’

People? It was one man, and he would be miles astern by now. But wait a minute! At the same time he’d noticed the engine room telegraph was on STOP, he’d automatically checked the rudder indicator. It was hard over! He sprang to his feet and ran out onto the wing of the bridge where Gutierrez was pointing. He looked down and saw Goddard and Karen Brooke clinging to the life ring right below them.

‘Come on!’ he ordered. Followed by Gutierrez, he ran back through the wheelhouse to the chartroom, and down the inside companionway.

In the confusion on the after end of the crew’s deck, two fire hoses with a pair of sailors on each nozzle were throwing hard jets of water into the inferno of number three hold. The bos’n and Otto, armed with the Luger and the .45, were directing them and holding back excited crew members jammed into the entrance of the passageway and clustered in gesticulating groups forward of them. Lind and Mayr were standing at the starboard corner of the deck house. Lind was now carrying an automatic rifle, and they were speaking rapidly in German, with Mayr doing most of the talking, apparently giving orders. Lind nodded. He gestured to the bos’n, and to a member of the black gang, the twelve-to-four oiler, a thin, hard-faced man named Spivak. They came over. Lind spoke to them, still in German. Spivak nodded. The bos’n handed Spivak the Luger, and received the automatic rifle Lind had been carrying. Lind ran up the ladder to the boat deck.

In the wheelhouse, he lifted the phone off its hook, and rang the wireless room. ‘Come up to the chartroom, Sparks,’ he ordered. He reset the selector switch, and called the engine room.

‘The fire’s out of control,’ he said. ‘Secure the pump. Kill the fires under the boilers, and bring your men out. We’re going to abandon ship. Yes. Right now.’

He replaced the phone, strode into the chartroom and began to work up their position by dead reckoning since the star sights he’d got at dawn. Sparks came in. Lind wrote out the latitude and longitude, and gave it to him.

‘Here’s where we are right now,’ he said. ‘Give it to the Phoenix, and tell them to keep coming at full speed.’ Then, on a second sheet of paper, he wrote out another position, and slashed a large X across it. ‘So you won’t get ‘em mixed up,’ he said. ‘This is a fake, two hundred miles to the east of us. After you sign off with the Phoenix, get on the distress frequency, send an SOS, and say we’re afire and it’s out of control. As soon as you’re sure somebody’s got it, shut down, and smash the transmitter, just in case there may be another radioman aboard.’

Sparks looked at him, and then away. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said.

Lind’s eyes were dangerous. ‘You don’t what?’

‘It’s thirty men. This is not what I agreed to do.’

Lind caught the front of his shirt and pulled him close. ‘When the Phoenix picks us up,’ he said, ‘if they didn’t get this message and hear the SOS, I’ll disembowel you alive, on deck in front of everybody. You ever see it done to a shark?’

* * *

Goddard and Karen Brooke held onto the life ring in the rain and blown spindrift and continued to stare anxiously up at the wing of the bridge. It had been two or three minutes since they’d seen Antonio Gutierrez, and then the third mate, look down at them and disappear. They expected any moment to see Lind or one of his men. Then Goddard sighed softly. Svedberg had appeared at the bulwark in the forward well-deck just at the break of the midships house. He dropped over a roll of line which uncoiled as it fell. They swam over to it. Goddard threw a bowline in the end of it.

‘When I get up,’ he told Karen, ‘put your legs through here and sit in it. We’ll haul you up.’

She nodded. He caught the line, planted his feet against the steel plates, and began to walk up the side, hauling himself hand over hand. He grabbed the bulwark, got a knee on it, and dropped down on deck. No one was in sight except Svedberg and Gutierrez, but they had to hurry. Somebody could spot them any minute. Just beyond them, the steel door into the enclosed shelter deck was open.

‘Take off your jacket,’ he said to Gutierrez. The other looked at him blankly. ‘She’s got no clothes on,’ he explained. He leaned over the bulwark with Svedberg, and they began to hand her up. They lifted her over the rail, nude except for the nylon pants. He grabbed the jacket from the messman and passed it back to her as they slipped along the bulkhead toward the open door. There were no shouts of discovery. They were inside then, and she had the jacket on and was buttoning it. It covered her mid-thigh. Svedberg pulled the steel door shut and dogged it. They were safe for the moment, here below the crew’s deck where there were only storerooms and lockers and the cubicle where they’d sewn Mayr into the burial sack, but the air was thick with smoke and the odor of blistering paint, and the deck was hot to their bare feet. They were all dripping water, and Goddard was conscious then that he had on nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

Karen finished buttoning the jacket and smiled at Gutierrez. ‘Thank you, Antonio.’ The youth nodded and blushed, and looked away from her, self-conscious about her legs.

‘He saved you,’ Svedberg said. He told them quickly what had happened on the bridge. There was still a little blood mixed with the water running out of his hair. ‘After they slugged me, he put the wheel hard over himself, and watched for you.’

Goddard grinned as he caught the messman by the shoulder and shook it. ‘What some people will do to collect for a haircut. Thanks, Antonio.’

‘They threw you over?’ Svedberg asked.

‘Yes,’ Goddard said. He told them briefly about Madeleine Lennox and Rafferty and the fight on the promenade deck.

‘Do you know how many there are besides Lind?’ Svedberg asked.

‘No,’ Goddard said. ‘The bos’n, Otto, Karl—the dining room steward—and one of the black gang. But there might be more. And they’ll all have guns.’

‘And there’s not another one on the ship as far as I know,’ Svedberg said. He told them about searching the captain’s quarters, and that Steen was still alive. ‘I don’t know what they’re going to do about the ship and the rest of the crew, but if any of them see you, you’ll just go right over the side again. You’ll have to stay out of sight until I can find out what’s happening.’

‘Have you got a radio license?’ Goddard asked.

‘No. Hardly any mates do any more, but I’ll ask the second. And see if any of the engineers might have a gun. You won’t be able to take this smoke very long, so I’ll try to get you out of here. I’ll come back or send word.’

Svedberg and Gutierrez hurried down the passageway toward the ladder to the crew’s deck at the after end of it, almost invisible in the smoke by the time they reached it. Goddard shifted uncomfortably, and saw Karen do the same. The deck was burning their feet.

‘How is the smoke getting in here?’ Karen asked. At the far end, the door to the after well-deck was closed.

‘Most of it’s coming from here,’ Goddard said. ‘It’s the paint scorching on the deck and bulkheads back there. The tween-decks of number three probably runs in under the after end of this deck.’ And when the paint got hot enough, he thought, it would burst into flame. Then the fire would be loose in the whole midships house above.

The smoke was stinging their throats and making breathing difficult. Their eyes were watering. And they had to find something to stand on before their feet were blistered. He looked around. On their left, the engine room casing ran all the way down the passageway to the thwartships passage at the after end. Barset’s big refrigerator and chill room were on their right, but they were both locked, as were the next two doors that he could see. But the one beyond that was open. He caught Karen’s arm and they ran toward it, the deck growing hotter with every step they went aft. If they didn’t find anything, they’d have to come back.

It was the small storeroom, he thought, where they’d stitched Mayr into the burial sack, and he remembered the wooden door on the two horses where the ‘body’ had lain. That would be perfect. He didn’t remember Krasicki until they’d shot inside the doorway and there on the same platform was the canvas mummy in its familiar, grisly shape. He saw Karen shudder, and they were turning to run back out when he caught sight of the bolt of canvas on the deck. They leaped over, and stood on it, conscious only of the relief of getting off the burning steel.

There was the sound of a shot somewhere above them. They exchanged an uneasy glance, but said nothing. Then just above their heads there were footsteps, a great many of them. Goddard oriented himself with relation to the rest of the midships structure. The men would be going forward along the port side of the crew’s deck. They were still passing. Were they fleeing the fire? The smoke was growing worse. His throat and nostrils burned with it, and he was seized with a fit of coughing. The temperature must be more than a hundred and twenty degrees. Sweat ran into his eyes. The footsteps ceased, and there was silence except for the rushing sound of the fire.

‘They were going forward,’ Karen said. ‘Do you suppose it has started to spread?’

'I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But let’s get out of this trap while we can make it to the ladder. If we can.’

He motioned for her to wait while he leaped to the door and hopped from one foot to another as he looked down the passageway to his right. The ladder was half obscured by smoke now, and for half the distance this way the paint on the steel deck plates was bubbling. It would stick to their feet and take the skin off. He turned back to Karen.

‘Let me have the canvas,’ he said. ‘Sit there for a minute.’ He gestured to the door supporting Krasicki’s body in its burial sack. She perched on the edge of it and lifted her feet. He grabbed up the bolt of cloth and leaped back into the passageway. Holding one end, he threw it toward the ladder. It unrolled to within a few feet of it.

He ran down the strip and kicked the remainder of the bolt. He could feel his feet blistering as he bounded the remaining distance and leaped to the ladder treads. He could see no one above him. ‘All right,’ he called softly. Karen emerged and ran toward the ladder. He watched to see she made it all right, and went on up.

There was no one in the passageway, and no sound except that of the rain and the roaring and crackling noises of the fire. That was odd. She came up behind him. They looked at each other, puzzled. They could duck into the hospital, which was just forward of them, but the silence worried him. The doorway opening onto the after end of the deck was less than six feet from them, but nobody had passed it, and there were no footsteps or voices from the men fighting the fire. He gestured for her to stay where she was, tiptoed over to it, and peered out. There was nobody fighting the fire. There was nobody in sight at all.

He beckoned, and she slipped up beside him in the doorway. The fire roared on unchecked from number three hatch, flames and boiling black smoke blowing off to starboard now in the wind, and they could feel the searing waves of heat on their faces. The steel hatch coaming glowed a dull red, and the deck all around gave off waves of steam as the rain lashed across it and vaporized on contact. At each corner of the deck up here, next to the ladders, was an abandoned fire hose, no water at all coming from the nozzles.

‘If they’d abandoned ship,’ Karen said, ‘they’d have gone up. They were going forward.’

They wheeled and ran along the deserted passageway. The rooms and fo’c’s’les were all empty. At the forward end, beyond the thwartships passage, were two messrooms. They were empty too, but there were portholes along the forward bulkhead. They hurried into the second one and around the long single table. Slipping up to separate portholes, they peered out cautiously, and saw at once why nobody was fighting the fire.

The forward well-deck below them was full of men standing in the blown curtains of rain. They were staring aft in the attitudes of animals at bay, some up at the bridge and others apparently at someone or something on this deck and just off to the right of where they were. It was the whole crew, Goddard thought. At a rapid glance he picked out Barset, Mr. Pargoras, Svedberg, the second mate, Gutierrez, two of the engineers, several of the sailors he knew by sight, and even two of the black gang who must be on watch now, wearing singlets and sweat rags.

Karen had moved around with the left side of her face against the bulkhead, peering out as far to the right as she could. She stepped back, looked at Goddard, and stabbed a finger in that direction. He looked. Otto was standing just beyond them where he could cover both ladders, an automatic rifle propped on the rail in front of him.

He beckoned to Karen, and they slipped back out into the passage. Just as they emerged they heard a noise somewhere on the starboard side as though somebody had dropped a pail. There was an instant of silence, and then a groan Goddard slipped on to the corner, and peered down the starboard passageway. Ahead of him was an open cleaning-gear locker. Sprawled on his side in front of it was a man clad only in dungarees and slides, near his head the empty pail he had apparently dislodged from a shelf while trying to pull himself erect. Goddard beckoned to Karen and ran back to him. He knelt and turned him on his back.

It was Koenig, the AB who’d given him the sport shin. He had apparently been shot through the chest. Blood was all over his rib cage and abdomen, and on the deck, and more bubbled from his nostrils and trickled from the corner of his mouth. Karen winced and closed her eyes for an instant, but she picked up his legs while Goddard caught him by the shoulders and they got him into a lower bunk in the fo’c’s’le next door. Goddard turned his head and propped it on a pillow so he wouldn’t strangle, cursing silently because there was nothing else he could do. Even a surgical team couldn’t save him without several liters of blood. He’d lost too much, and was slipping into shock.

Goddard knelt beside him. ‘Who did it?’ he asked.

‘The bos’n.’ Koenig started to choke. Goddard turned him back on his side and snatched at part of the blue bedspread to wipe the blood from his mouth. He took a gasping breath. 'I tried to hide—in the locker. To get behind him—get the gun. I knew what they were going to do.’

‘What?’ Goddard asked.

Koenig gave no indication he had heard. His eyes closed, but he went on with his halting speech. He’d overheard Mayr and Lind speaking in German while the others were fighting the fire.

'I am German,’ he said, with another fight for breath. ‘Mayr was telling Lind what to do. Stop the fire pump—let her burn. Get a cutting torch from the engine room—wreck all the lifeboats except one. Send an SOS—with a phony position. Spivak—oiler—’ Koenig’s voice stopped.

‘What about Spivak?’ Goddard asked.

“In the engine room—opening the sea intakes.’

Goddard looked up at Karen. ‘Thirty men,’ she whispered. ‘Who could do it?’

‘Koenig.’ Goddard leaned close to him. ‘Koenig, can you hear me? You say Mayr was giving the orders. Was it military? You know—as if he were Lind’s superior officer?’

‘No.’ Koenig’s voice was barely audible. ‘It was worse. He is Lind’s father.’

That answered a lot of things, Goddard thought, including Karen’s question: Who could do it? Blood would tell. And it didn’t matter in the slightest how much, or whose.

Koenig’s eyes opened wide for an instant as though he were watching something terrible he was powerless to escape. Did you see it coming for you in those last few minutes, Goddard wondered, even when you were in shock? He was trying to speak again, but his voice was only a whisper, and Goddard had to lean down almost to his lips to hear. ‘Oh, God. Another one.’

13

The only thing they had going for them, Goddard thought, was that Lind didn’t know they were aboard. That wasn’t much, considering the time margin they were operating with. In a half hour, or perhaps less, the fire was going to spread into the shelter deck and come roaring up through the whole midships house. The engine room was being flooded, and while he didn’t know how fast it came in, you would reach a point of no return as soon as you could no longer get at the valves to stop it, and the pumps and the boiler fireboxes were flooded.

Koenig was still fighting for life, his breathing a series of rattling gasps it was awful to hear and which couldn’t go on for more than a few minutes longer. They didn’t want to leave him, but he was already unconscious, and time was flying past them. Goddard nodded to Karen, and they went out and hurried aft along the passageway.

She shuddered once, and drew a hand across her face. Then she asked, ‘What can we do?’

'I want one of those guns,’ he said. His voice was calm, but when she looked around at him she saw in his eyes that same feral yearning they’d had there in Madeleine Lennox’ cabin before he went for Rafferty.

‘One gun? Against six of them?’ she asked.

They had reached the doorway opening onto the after deck. Opposite it was one of the steel doors into the engine room casing. He motioned for silence, stepped over, and quietly pulled it open a few inches. He peered in at the catwalks around the great mass of the main engine and the tracery of steel ladders leading down to the floor plates thirty feet below. On a grating halfway down where he could watch all the ladders was a man with a handgun shoved into the waistband of his dungarees. That would be Spivak, standing guard over the opened sea intakes. There was no way to reach him except down the ladders right in front of him. Scratch that one.

He looked down again. With the Leander’s slow roll, a wave of water several inches deep was sweeping across the floor plates. It was already out of the bilges. He softly closed the door, and as he turned he saw the smoke swirling up around the ladder from the shelter deck where he and Karen had emerged a few minutes ago. It was coming at them from both directions.

He was thinking swiftly. The others? Lind, Mayr, the bos’n, and Karl would be on the boat deck, all armed, and only two of them, at most, busy cutting the bottoms out of the other three boats with the torch. Simple suicide. Lind alone, unarmed, could probably kill him with his bare hands. Otto? With a steel bulkhead behind him and fifty feet of open deck on each side, he was impregnable. And unless he was removed, they were all finished.

‘What could you do with a gun?’ she asked again. ‘Against all six of them?’

‘Kill Otto,’ he said.

She understood what he meant. They had to get the crew back here. Even if he could get into the engine room, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to shut off the sea intakes or start the fire pump, to say nothing of the fact he wouldn’t recognize either of them if he fell over them.

‘But as soon as they realize what Lind’s doing,’ she protested. ‘Otto won’t be able to keep them there.’

He could until it was too late, Goddard thought, but there wasn’t time to explain. They knew already. Of the thirty, Otto could stop only the first six or eight, but who was going to be in the first six or eight? Until he emptied his clip, nobody would get to the top of either of those ladders. That also meant the second wave had to climb over a ladder full of wounded men, with Lind and Mayr shooting straight down on top of them from the bridge.

Sparks! He was the only one who’d be alone and where there was a chance to reach him. He grabbed Karen by the arm and ran her down the passage to the door of the hospital. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘Bolt the door, and don’t open it until you know it’s me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘The radio shack. I’ll only be a few minutes.’

He went up the inside companionway on the run, trying to visualize where the wireless room would be. The cage for the antenna lead-in was on the starboard side of the boat deck near the bridge, so it should be forward in the starboard passageway. He emerged into the thwartships passage of the officers’ deck and turned right, going softly now, and listening. As he turned the corner, he heard a noise ahead of him, but it wasn’t a radio receiver or the staccato chirping of continental morse; it sounded like a wrecking crew at work, metallic crashings and a splintering of glass.

It was coming from the second door in front of him. He eased up to it and peered in. The radio console with its main, emergency, and high-frequency transmitters, its receivers, and its desk and typewriter stand, was in the middle of the room, facing the door. Sparks had all three transmitters tilted out in the servicing position with their circuits and components exposed, and was standing with his back to the door, using a fire ax to reduce them to electronic hash.

Lind never missed a bet, Goddard thought. He should have realized a mind like that would never overlook even the possibility there might be another qualified operator aboard. He sighed, stepped softly up behind the Latin on bare feet, and slugged him over a kidney. Sparks slumped in agony, and dropped the ax. Goddard twisted an arm behind his back and ran him across the room into the steel bulkhead. His knees buckled. Goddard flipped him over onto his back even as he was collapsing, and he lay looking up, dazed but still conscious, the dark eyes eloquent with hatred. Kneeling beside him, Goddard patted his pockets. They were empty.

'I want a gun,’ he said.

‘La madre.’

‘Where is it?’ Goddard leaned back and could just reach the head of the dropped fire ax. He set the pointed side of it on Sparks’ throat. ‘Why not tell me now? When this goes through your voice box, you’ll have to point.’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘I guess I should have told you,’ Goddard said. ‘I’m short of time.’ He began to press on the ax.

‘If I had a gun, I’d be glad to give it to you.’

‘Sure, I know. And where.’

‘Listen. If you’ll take that thing out of my throat, maybe I can tell you so you’ll believe me. I hate you. I hate your guts. I hate all of you arrogant pigs. But if I had a gun and thought you could stop that murdering cabrón, I’d give it to you.’

Goddard frowned, but released the pressure on the ax. ‘Why?’

‘I went into this for the money, because I needed it, and nobody was going to be hurt. But now it’s gone bad, so he’s going to leave the whole crew here to burn.’

‘What about that?’ Goddard gestured toward the wrecked transmitters.

‘He said he’d gut me. In public. And he would.’

Score another one for the Lind mind, Goddard thought; public was the operative word. You couldn’t depend on scaring a Spaniard with death; only with humiliation. He got up and tossed the ax into one of the transmitters. ‘Have at it.’

Sparks stared. ‘Just take my word for it? You’re not going to tie me up?’

‘I haven’t got time,’ Goddard said. ‘Anyway, nobody that hates me could be all bad.’ He went out and hurried down the companionway.

He might be taking a chance. If Sparks called Lind, he and Karen would be dead in the next five minutes, but he didn’t think he would. In a world of office-seekers and deodorant commercials, how could you doubt a posture like that?

Smoke was growing thicker in the passageway on the crew’s deck, boiling up in dense clouds through the hatch from below. When Karen opened the door of the hospital she was coughing with it and tears ran down her cheeks. They were out of time already; they had to do something, and now.

‘Sparks didn’t have a gun,’ he said, ‘so we’re down to the desperation stuff. We’ve got to go for Otto, and there just may be a way I can do it. As long as he’s in the middle of the deck, there’s not a prayer, because it’s at least fifty feet from the corner of the deckhouse, all in the open, and I’d never make it. But if I can get him to come toward me—’

‘How?’

If I go out on deck on one side, the men in the well-deck will see me. They wouldn’t give it away intentionally, but out of thirty at least ten will keep looking in that direction, so he’ll know there’s somebody around the corner. He’ll come over to see, and if I can hear him I can tell when he’s close enough to try to jump him.’

‘And you’re a producer?’ She shook her head. ‘Harry, that man has gone toward that corner, or door, in a thousand pictures, and the only thing that’s always the same is that the gun is straight out ahead of him, ready to shoot. If you were close enough to dance, it wouldn’t work. But there is a way.’

‘What?’

‘Diversion. It’s just as old, but in this case it’ll do the trick. We both step out, on opposite sides, but I come on past the corner so he can see me. He’s certain I’m dead miles back there in the water, so he’ll freeze just long enough for you to reach him.’

‘Sure. And that grease gun will be pointed right at you, so when I land on him he’ll cut you in two.’

‘No. Just before you hit him, I’ll duck back past the corner. It’ll be only one step.’

He nodded. There was another way, too, that he could ensure the gun would be off her before a reflex could trigger it. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but one more thing. That rail where he is is solid, so if we crawl forward, the men in the well-deck won’t see us and give it away. But you stand up two or three steps before you get to the corner. Give him some preparation, so you won’t startle him into shooting before he thinks.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry.’ She was supremely confident. ‘I tell you he’ll freeze.’

He had to have a weapon. They found a twelve-inch crescent wrench in a locker. It had a brutal heft to it, which was just what he wanted; it had to be done with one blow, and he didn’t care if he drove Otto’s skull into his pelvis. He slipped forward to the messroom porthole and checked again. The big sailor was still in the same place.

They stepped out onto the after end of the deck to the roar and the heat of the fire. It was like a scene from hell, he thought, but the fury of the squall was beginning to slacken a little. He chose the starboard side. That way he’d be running for Otto with the bulkhead on his left, his right unhampered. They went in opposite directions, and when they reached the corners they looked back at each other. She smiled and gestured with circled thumb and forefinger. He wished he felt that relaxed; he was beginning to have butterflies. That was going to be the longest fifty feet in the world. He dropped to his knees and started to crawl.

It was awkward because he could use only one hand. With nothing on but a pair of shorts he had no place to carry the wrench except in the other, and he couldn’t let it bump the deck. As he went forward he rehearsed it in his mind. One stride before he reached Otto, he’d sing out. The sailor would start to whirl, swinging the gun, so it would be well off her before the wrench landed. That was simple enough, but he wasn’t as certain about the other signal, that to the men in the well-deck.

Mayr or Lind, or both, would be watching the well-deck too, and they would kill a lot of men on those ladders, shooting straight down from the bridge. But if he could signal them not to rush the minute they saw him get Otto, they wouldn’t have to file up like ducks in a shooting gallery. They’d all make it if he could get them to hold, as if Otto were still there, until he could go up to the after end of the boat deck and give them covering fire.

He looked out at the sea. The wind and rain were lessening all the time now, and he could see the pall of smoke blowing out to leeward for several hundred yards. It was only a few more feet to the corner. He was beginning to tighten up. Suppose Otto happened to be looking this way just as he peeked around the corner? Well, for Christ’s sake, what could he do about it? Why get in an uproar over something entirely out of his control?

He was there. With his hand as near the deck as he could get it, he leaned forward and peered around. Otto was in profile fifty feet away, staring unwaveringly down into the well-deck in front of him. His belly was against the rail, and though his forearms were resting on it, he held the weapon at ready, in both hands, with a finger inside the trigger guard. Goddard took a long, deep breath, and waited, conscious of that impulse to yawn which in a situation like this was just the opposite of what it implied.

Thirty more seconds went by. She was giving him plenty of time to be set. But not too much, Danish doll; this can get pretty hairy. Now! Otto’s head was turning; he was looking to the left. The men in the well-deck had seen her. He tried to breathe against the tightness in his chest, and gathered himself to leap. Then Karen Brooke stepped out into the open at the other corner of the deck house. He stared, and almost forgot to go into action, with an impression he must be as goggle-eyed as Otto. She’d taken off Antonio’s jacket.

She was facing Otto completely nude above the nylon briefs, and if that weren’t enough to nail any normal male under ninety-five solidly to the deck, she was also as wet and dripping as if she’d just emerged from the sea, and drowned strands of blonde hair were plastered over her face. She made a beautiful ghost, he thought, but he almost felt sorry for Otto as he got into gear at last and started running softly across the long expanse of open deck. It seemed almost superfluous to hit him.

But if Otto was no longer a problem, the men in the well-deck were something else. As he ran, presumably in full view of them, he made a slashing Cut! gesture with both arms and then pushed toward them with his palms, but not a damned one of them had even seen him. And suppose he couldn’t even get Otto to whirl and swing that gun off her? Take him by the shoulders and turn him, like a manikin in Macy’s window? It was less than ten feet now, and he was driving.

‘Otto!’ he snapped, and whacked the rail with the wrench at the same time. That did it.

The big sailor came unglued at last, and started to wheel, and at the same time Karen jumped back out of sight around the corner. He swung down with the wrench, getting the wrist into it at the end, and it made a sound he was afraid Lind might hear on the bridge. Otto simply collapsed, two hundred pounds of bone and cabled muscle folding up and settling to the deck like a deflating pneumatic toy. There was a good chance he’d killed him, and while it might bother him later, at the moment he didn’t seem to care.

Strangely, the gun didn’t fire at all. With his left hand he grabbed it from the other’s lifeless grasp before it had a chance to drop. He turned. The men in the well-deck were catching up now, and when they saw him with the gun, two or three started to break for the ladders. He made a savage gesture of the arm: Back! But they didn’t get it fast enough. There was a shout from the bridge, followed by the crash of a gun. He dropped the wrench, pointed the gun out toward the sea, and pulled the trigger. It was on single fire, so he shot twice more.

He made the gesture again, and this time they all got it. Nobody had fallen at the shot from the bridge, but now he saw Barset, at his third shot, clap a hand dramatically to his chest, grimace with agony, sway, and fall forward on his face. Trust a con man to pick it up, but, God, what a ham.

The men were shifting back now, watching him with the same fear and hatred they had Otto, so it should be safe as far as the bridge was concerned. He gave it to them in pantomime: pointing to his watch, holding up five fingers, then to himself, pointing aft, up, and then swinging the gun forward with a raking motion. There was no way they could signal they understood, but they should have it. He dropped beside Otto and fanned him for spare clips. He had two.

He waved to the crew, and ran around the corner. Karen was waiting for him. She had the jacket on again and looked blandly innocent.

‘Now I know what they mean by overkill,’ he said, as they hurried aft.

‘Well, you were taking a terrible chance. And when I guaranteed he’d freeze, I meant it.’

‘Yeah, but didn’t you consider I might choke up too?’

‘Oh, come. The worldly Mr. Goddard?’

They stopped near the after corner of the deckhouse while he told her what he was going to do. Then he thought of something else.

‘I’ve got to get Spivak out of the engine room,’ he said. ‘They can’t start the fire pump or close the sea intakes even after they get here. And we need that gun.’

‘But if they hear any shooting down here, they’ll all come down.’

‘I think I know how we can do it.’ He told her while he made a quick inspection of the gun. He knew nothing at all about automatic weapons, and it was of European manufacture. Precious seconds flew by while he found out how to change clips, and then, with the gun empty, experimented with the settings to discover which way it was on safety. Then the remaining one had to be continuous fire. He shoved in a full clip, and handed Karen the other two. ‘Hold these for me. I’ll be right back.’

He ran in through the smoke in the passage, and up the inside companionway to the wireless room. Sparks had closed the transmitters, and was seated at his desk with his head in his hands. When Goddard spoke from the doorway, he turned. He looked at the gun with no expression of any kind, and said nothing.

‘The crew’ll be back here in a few minutes,’ Goddard said. ‘If they get control of the ship again, it’s not going to be any love feast, and they won’t believe you wanted out of the mess unless I tell ‘em.’

Sparks nodded. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got to get Spivak out of the engine room.’ He indicated the telephone. ‘Can you call him from here?’

‘No. The only master control is on the bridge.’

‘Well, there’s another way. Come down to the grating on the crew’s deck and call out to him. Tell him Lind’s launching the boat and is going to leave him. I’ll take it from there. A deal?’

‘Let’s go,’ Sparks said. They ran down the companionway. When they reached the crew’s deck, flames were now shooting up in the smoke boiling from the hatchway. The shelter deck was afire.

‘Make it fast,’ Goddard said. He pulled open the steel door to the engine room casing and stood out of sight to one side. Sparks stepped in on the grating. ‘Spivak!’ he called out. ‘You’d better get up here. They’re launching the boat.’

From where he was, Goddard couldn’t see in. He waited. The fire continued to mount around the ladder from the shelter deck, and paint was bursting into flame above it here in the passage. Smoke was choking him. Sparks stepped back into view.

‘He’s coming,’ he whispered. ‘On the last ladder. Gun’s in his dungarees.’

Goddard nodded, and gestured for him to move back. Spivak lunged into view through the doorway. Goddard shoved the muzzle of the gun into his side. ‘Hold it, Spivak!’ The oiler gasped, and stiffened. Goddard pulled the Luger from his waistband, and tossed it to Sparks. ‘Hang onto that for a minute.’

Spivak shot a look of hatred at the operator. Goddard prodded him again with the muzzle of the gun and jerked his head down the passage. ‘Get going!’ Spivak hesitated for a second, but turned and marched ahead of him. They reached the open door of the hospital. ‘Inside,’ Goddard ordered.

Spivak turned. His eyes were terrified as he gestured toward the flames and smoke boiling up at the end of the passage. ‘But—but—she’s afire.’

‘I’m glad you called that to my attention,’ Goddard said. He put a hand in Spivak’s face and shoved. The oiler shot in against the bunks. ‘Wish us luck.’

He pulled the door shut and dropped the padlock through the hasp, but didn’t snap it. Running back down the passage, he gestured to Sparks. They leaped out on deck and around to the port side away from the searing waves of heat from number three hatch. Karen was waiting. Goddard took the Luger from Sparks and gave it to her.

‘When they come up the ladder, give this to Mr. Svedberg,’ he said swiftly. ‘Tell him I’ll need help up there, as fast as I can get it. Maybe they can get up through the chartroom. Spivak’s in the hospital, and if they can’t control the fire, let him out, but I don’t think he’ll be any better off when they get their hands on him. And tell them Sparks had nothing to do with leaving them here.’

She nodded, her eyes apprehensive. She knew what he meant: it was in case he didn’t make it down from there himself.

‘I promised,’ he said. ‘And they might get to the radio room before I have a chance to tell ‘em. Let’s go, Sparks.’

He grabbed the two spare clips, and they plunged back inside and ran up to the officers’ deck. Smoke was boiling up the companionway now, and pouring into the passages above. ‘Lock yourself in till they’ve all got the word,’ he told Sparks. The Latin nodded, and went toward the radio room. Goddard wheeled and hurried down the passage toward the exit at the after end of the deck, feeling the butterflies again.

14

He peered out. There was nobody in sight. Over the noise of the fire he could hear a metallic banging from the boat deck above him. It had been more than five minutes now, and he had to hurry before the men below decided something had happened to him and made a break for it. He set the gun on continuous fire, but was hampered by the spare clips; he had no way to carry them except in a hand. He stepped out, cautiously watching the openings at the tops of the two ladders, slipped over to the port one, and started up. His head came level with the deck above. He peered over.

Directly ahead of him near the forward end of the deck, the bos’n and Karl were wrecking the port lifeboats. The covers and strongbacks had been removed, and Karl was standing up in the forward one using the pointed side of a fire ax to destroy the flotation units. The after one already had a long hole cut out of the bottom along the turn of the bilge, and the bos’n was squatted on the deck below the forward one with the torch, doing the same to it. Karl’s back was to him, and the bos’n was wearing goggles as he guided the torch. Goddard’s view of the starboard side was cut off by the steel gable of the engine room skylight. Its high point was about three feet above the deck, and it was only a few feet forward of him.

He shot another glance toward Karl and the bos’n, slid up over the edge of the deck, and snaked his way toward it, crawling on his forearms as he carried the gun and spare clips. He was behind it now. He dropped the clips, took the gun in both hands, and peered over the edge of it. He had a clear view of the whole boat deck from here. The two starboard lifeboats also had their covers and strongbacks removed, and the after one was swung out in its davits and lowered until its gunwales were just below the level of the deck. Lind was standing in it, stowing something. Mayr was near the wheelhouse on the starboard side of the bridge, looking down into the forward well-deck with the machine pistol in his hand.

Goddard took another deep breath against the tight band around his chest, raised to his knees, and started shooting. He fired a burst of three into the canvas dodger where Mayr’s legs should be, swung the gun right, and loosed three more into the starboard lifeboat where Lind was standing. The hulls were flying out of the gun, some of them still in the air and the noise assaulting his eardrums as he swept the gun left and raked a burst across the port lifeboats. Karl dived headfirst into the forward one, and the bos’n dropped the torch and hit the deck behind a cradle.

Goddard swung right again. Mayr was no longer in view on the wing of the bridge, but he loosed another burst into the canvas above where he should be as the gun swung on past onto the starboard boats. Lind had dived into the bottom of the one where he’d been standing, and now was raising his head above the level of the deck, lifting a gun. Goddard pulled the trigger again, and on the second shot the clip was empty. Lind ducked back.

Goddard dropped behind the steel wall of the skylight, yanked out the empty clip, and shoved in a fresh one. A gun crashed somewhere forward of him, and a bullet screamed off the skylight just over his head. He slid over three feet, and peered around the edge. The bos’n was prone behind the lifeboat cradle, his face and arm in view as he raised the gun for another shot. Goddard put a burst into the deck beside him, throwing splinters, and swung fast to the right. Mayr was raising over the canvas dodger on the bridge. He shot. The bullet gouged the deck just to Goddard’s left. Goddard fired, and Mayr dropped from sight. Still swinging, Goddard fired a string across the top of the boat Lind was in. Lind was still out of sight. He jerked the gun around and threw three more shots into the cradle in front of the bos’n. Karl had never appeared at all since the din began. Goddard put another short burst through the canvas dodger above Mayr, and that clip was empty.

All the crew should be up out of the well-deck now, and if he could keep them pinned down for another minute, help would come pouring out of the wheelhouse behind them. He’d dropped and was yanking out the empty clip when his whole back turned to ice and his mind shouted the warning he should have had seconds ago. Lind! He’d never reappeared. And from that partially lowered boat he could swing down to the rail of the deck below.

He swiveled and saw the face of the big mate already above the level of the deck just feet behind him, one hand out in front of it with the .45 ready to shoot him in the back of the head. In a continuation of the same turning movement, he threw the gun backhand. It hit the hand just as the .45 went off and then slammed on into Lind’s face between the ladder railings. Lind dropped back down the ladder. Goddard plunged headfirst down on top of him. His momentum carried the two of them off the ladder, to wheel out and down onto the steel deck below, and even as they were falling he was conscious of shouts and the sound of guns going off above them.

They landed with a bone-jarring impact and rolled. Goddard broke free. The .45 had been knocked from Lind’s hand, and he had to get to it first; against the great strength and catlike reflexes of this man he had no chance at all in a bare-handed fight. Lind would beat him to the deck and choke him to death in minutes. He looked frantically around and saw it behind the ladder. Lind was already bouncing up. The thrown gun had opened a cut on his check and blood was streaming from it below the cold light of the eyes. He lunged at Goddard. Goddard sidestepped and hit him on the side of the neck hard enough to drop a lesser man, but Lind merely staggered for an instant and whirled to come for him again.

Goddard reached behind the ladder for the .45. He had it in his fingers when Lind hit him from the side. They went down, and the gun skated and bounced toward the scupper on the port side of the deck. They rolled. Goddard smashed at his face, and even in all this madness he was conscious of the smoke pouring out of the passage beside them and the shouts of the men on the boat deck above. He got a knee into Lind’s stomach, slammed a fist into his throat, and managed to break free from those terrible arms once more. He plunged to his feet and ran toward the gun.

He scooped it up, but was going too fast on the wet and slippery deck and couldn’t stop or turn. He was wheeling, still out of control and going on toward the rail, when the big man caught him from behind. His feet were snatched off the deck as Lind whirled him about and lifted him to throw him over the rail. Lind’s hip crashed into the rail, and with all of Goddard’s weight and his own pulling them outward, his feet skidded backward on the deck and they both wheeled over it and fell into the sea.

It was over thirty feet, past the promenade and crew’s deck. They hit the surface with agonizing impact and went far under, still locked together. Goddard fought to break the grip of those arms. He caught a thumb, pulled back and down on it until he felt it break. The arm relaxed for a moment. He pushed, and then kicked, and was free, already losing consciousness as he rose to the surface. He gulped for air. The deck above was full of men, and he saw Karen, screaming. Then he was pushed under, and Lind had his legs locked about him, and he knew it was the end; they were like steel. He hadn’t got enough air, and his struggles were growing weaker.

Darkness was closing in on him when somewhere far off through the singing in his ears he heard a cracking sound and then another as though his ribs were beginning to break. Then, strangely, the massive legs went limp and he was free and drifting upward to flounder helplessly on the surface. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The great blond head was awash beside him, beginning to drop away below the surface, and the water around it was stained with blood. He looked up. Harald Svedberg was above him on the corner of the boat deck with a gun in his hand. Two sailors jumped in beside him from the crew’s deck, and somebody was throwing a line. Goddard turned and looked down and saw the giant body make one last convulsive movement as Eric Lind drifted from his sight.

The sailors grabbed him and made the line fast under his arms. One of them grinned. ‘Don’t you ever get enough of this stupid ocean?’

They hauled him up and lifted him over the rail. His strength was returning now, and he was able to stand. Water ran out of his hair. His shorts were ripped all the way up one side, and his hands were battered and bleeding. The fire roared on from number three hatch, but two hoses were throwing water into it now, and he could hear more hard jets beating against the bulkheads inside the deckhouse. Men pounded him on the back as they unbent the line about his chest. Karen Brooke was looking at him with tears streaming down her face.

‘I—I wonder what you would think,’ she said in a tiny voice, ‘if you ever saw people just walking aboard a ship on a g-g-gangplank.’ She broke up then into sobs and laughter.

* * *

They began to gain on it, and in an hour they knew they were going to win. The fire in the shelter deck was out, and three hoses were pouring tons of water into number three hold where there was now more smoke than fire.

Mayr and the bos’n were dead, shot by Harald Svedberg in the fight on the boat deck. Mayr had been wounded in the legs by one of the bursts from Goddard’s gun, but had tried to shoot Svedberg as the men ran up through the chartroom and out onto the bridge. Karl had surrendered, and was locked in the hospital along with Spivak and Otto, who had regained consciousness. Sparks was allowed to remain free, and was assessing the damage to the radio equipment. The main and high-frequency transmitters were beyond repair, but he thought he could have the emergency in operation by the following afternoon.

By eleven o’clock there were no more flames, only dense steam and smoke rising from the hatch. Karen had gone up to her cabin to get dressed, and Goddard was watching as the crew continued to throw water into the hold. One of the sailors looked at him in his torn shorts, and shook his head.

‘Well, men, I guess we got to take up another collection for this Hollywood big-shot.’

‘Yeah,’ another said, with a grin. ‘Talk about schooner-rigged. Every time you see him his ass is hanging out somewhere else.’

‘If I ever get back there,’ Goddard said, ‘I’m going to start a new status symbol. Owning your own underwear.’

The chief reported that everything below was under control and they could get under way. Sparks told them about the rendezvous with the Phoenix, so Mr. Svedberg said they would steam north for two hours before resuming course. Nobody had any desire to encounter the craft.

Twenty minutes later, the Leander vibrated hesitantly, as though testing herself, and began to move slowly ahead. Goddard mounted to the promenade deck. Karen Brooke was just emerging from her cabin. Her hair was still wet, but she had put on a dress and some makeup.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what happened to the better half of my combat team?’

‘She’s just become a devout civilian. And you can quote me.’

‘I can do better than that.’ He grinned. ‘I’m going to join you.’

They went into Madeleine Lennox’ cabin, where, several years ago, it seemed, they had decided they should try to save her life. She still lay quietly, apparently in the same position, covered with her sheet. Goddard felt her pulse, looked at Karen, and nodded.

‘She’s okay.’

‘And just think,’ Karen said, ‘sometime late this afternoon, she’ll wake up and ask what happened.’

* * *

Captain Steen awoke late that night, but was ill and in pain from whatever Lind had given him, so it was three days before he was up. Until then, Harald Svedberg and the second mate stood watch-and-watch. Goddard found an ink pad in the captain’s desk and he and Mr. Svedberg did what he thought was a fairly creditable job of taking Mayr’s fingerprints before he was buried. The third mate had also started the job of questioning the remaining members of the plot.

‘None of them know very much, or say they don’t,’ he told Goddard the second day after they were under way again. ‘I think, actually, they’re telling the truth; Lind kept it all under his hat. Sparks doesn’t even have any idea what the Phoenix was, where she was from, or where they were going to take Mayr. Lind just gave him some fake call letters and a list of illegal frequencies they changed every day, and everything was coded. It was all handled in radiotelegraph, of course. We don’t have a radiotelephone. He said the other man was a good operator, and that’s all he knows.’

The rendezvous was supposed to be at night, Mr. Svedberg went on, with the Phoenix showing no lights. There would be another engine room breakdown rigged by Spivak, and Mayr and Krasicki would be slipped off the after well-deck on a rubber raft, to be picked up by the Phoenix after the ship had gone on. They all swore nobody was supposed to be killed. That could be true enough, the third mate thought, but there was no doubt Lind and Mayr were prepared for it if it became necessary to judge from the number of guns they carried.

And where did you lay the blame for the fact that it had gone wrong, Goddard wondered, with the result that now six men were dead, one of them, Koenig, entirely innocent? On his casual remark about the direction of the scene? On Madeleine Lennox’ careless meddling? No, the most probable answer was that Lind was unstable, as Karen insisted; he was paranoid, or on the borderline, and any trivial remark might have triggered the whole ghastly mess.

The Leander plowed on, shorthanded, scarred, and smelling of smoke, but she would make Manila only a little over a day late. Captain Steen took over a watch, and Antonio Gutierrez was moved up to be the dining room steward. Sparks got the emergency transmitter in operation on the second day, located a ship that would relay for him, and they rejoined the rest of the world. Pleas for news poured in from the wire services by the hour, and Goddard could imagine the furors in the world press.

The third evening after dinner Goddard mixed a tall gin and tonic and went out on the forward end of the promenade deck with Karen Brooke to watch the sunset. They were leaning on the rail struck silent by the vast orchestration of color when Captain Steen came by and remarked for what must have been the twentieth time that it had been an awful thing.

Then he regarded the drink with pious disapproval, and said, ‘It seems to me, Mr. Goddard, you ought to be down on your knees thanking the Lord you’re alive, instead of drinking that stuff.’

‘I expect you’re right, Captain,’ Goddard agreed. Then, because the impulse was irresistible, he added, ‘I imagine when we get to Manila, there’ll be quite an investigation.’ Steen shuddered.

‘I mean,’ Goddard went on innocently, ‘what with a conspiracy, a fire, a mutiny, and a fake SOS. Probably be quite a bit of paperwork.’

Steen departed. Karen smiled at Goddard and shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t do that to the poor man.’

‘Let him find his own sunset.’

They fell silent for a moment, and then she said, ‘You claim I saved your life, and now you’ve saved mine. Is it a standoff?’

‘Not a chance,’ Goddard replied. ‘I won going away; I saved the best one. Ask any of the crew.’

‘Well, they’re sailors. There is a certain amount of prejudice.’

He looked around at her. ‘What about that old Chinese belief of responsibility? Do we cancel each other, or is it doubled?’

‘That’s an interesting point. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Goddard said. ‘But when we get to Manila, we could run over to Hong Kong and look into it.’

‘I have to go to work.’ She hesitated. ‘But I suppose I could get another week’s leave.’

‘Then it’s a deal,’ he said. ‘And don’t feel you’ll be ashamed of me; I’m sure the crew will give me another pair of pants.’

She laughed. ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’

‘Forget that line,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m out of practice and it’s hard for me to say anything I mean. And what I meant was simply that I wish you would.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to break the code. Now, tell me about your daughter.’

For the first time in five months he could. It was twenty minutes later when Madeleine Lennox came around the corner of the deckhouse looking for him. She stopped, arrested by something in the attitude of the two figures leaning on the rail, and shrugged. You won a few, you lost a few. She turned, and went aft in search of Barset.