Dead calm

Dead Calm

by Charles Williams

1963

1

Though it had been less than four hours since he’d secured everything on deck and come below, Ingram awoke just at dawn. He turned his head in the faint light inside the cabin and looked at his wife asleep in the opposite bunk. Rae, wearing sleeveless short pajamas of lightweight cotton, was lying on her stomach, her face turned toward him, the mop of tawny hair spread across the pillow encircled by her arms, her legs spread slightly apart and braced, even in sleep, against the motion of the ketch. She never minded, he thought; some people grew irritable and impossible to live with on a sailboat too long becalmed, with its endless rolling and slatting of gear and its annoying and unstoppable noises of objects shifting back and forth in drawers and lockers, but except for an occasional pungent remark when the stove threw something at her she took it uncomplainingly. They weren’t in a hurry, she pointed out, they were on their honeymoon, and they had privacy measurable in millions of square miles.

Without even consciously thinking about it, his mind received, filtered, and evaluated each of the individual sounds in the orchestration of creaks and minute collisions going on about him, oblivious to the total melody but capable of becoming instantly alert at the mere suspicion of a note that was out of place. Nothing was rolling or banging on deck; everything was still secure topside. The metallic bumping just beyond his feet in the galley section of the cabin was the teakettle sliding against the rails that kept it on the stove. The click and intermittent rattle above it were dishes shifting minutely inside their stowage on the bulkhead above the sink. The creaking was only a timber working normally as she swung and swung back; if a boat didn’t have flexibility it would break up against any kind of sea, like a car smashed against a wall. That sound of something rolling back and forth was a pencil loose in a drawer. The clock struck four bells. He stretched luxuriously. Six a.m. Hot. Dead calm. But at least they’d sailed out of yesterday’s grapefruit rinds. They’d had a light southeasterly breeze for six hours last night, which should put them at least another twenty-five miles along their course.

After sliding out of the bunk, he put on water for coffee, moving silently about the galley so as not to disturb Rae. He stripped off his pajamas, picked up a towel, and mounted the companion ladder to the cockpit. Everything on deck was drenched with dew; it stood in great sweaty beads on the brass cover of the binnacle, and the bottoms of the cockpit cushions he’d reversed last night were as wet as if they’d been rained on. It was full daylight now, and the towering escarpments of cloud to the eastward were shot with flame. Not a breath of air stirred; the surface of the Pacific was as unwrinkled as glass except for the heave and surge of the long groundswell running up from the infinite distances of the Southern Hemisphere.

Standing naked in the cockpit, he leaned over and peered into the binnacle from sheer force of habit to check the heading of the ketch as she lay dead in the water except for her rolling. She was lying 290 at the moment, almost abeam to the swell. He turned and looked forward. Everything was secure. Wind or no wind, it was morning, it was beautiful, and it was good to be alive. He was where he wanted to be, at sea with a sound boat and with Rae. They were nineteen days out of the Canal, bound for Tahiti and the islands to the south, tied to no schedule, free of the frustrations and annoyances of life ashore.

He grinned suddenly and made an impatient gesture with his hand. Goofing off. The water for the coffee would be boiling in a few minutes. Reaching inside the companion hatch, he switched off the masthead light, and went forward. Shoved under the lashings of the dinghy atop the deckhouse was a short ladder. He pulled it free, hung it over the port side, stepped over the lifeline, and dived. After coming to the surface, he swam with a powerful crawl stroke up along her side, under the bow, and back down the other side. He turned on his back and floated some fifty feet astern, looking up at her with affection.

Saracen was thirty-two feet on the waterline, forty over-all, ketch-rigged. She was mahogany planked over oak frames and had been built less than ten years ago by a New England yard. She wasn’t as fast as some, nor as tall and long-ended and patrician of line, but she was reasonably dry on deck and with her short overhang forward and her deep forefoot she pounded very little in a seaway. Deep-water cruising was what she was built for, he thought, and she was good at it. She’d take you there as fast as you needed to go, and she’d bring you back from anything a sane man would take her into.

He swam back, climbed aboard, and stowed the ladder. In the cockpit he rubbed himself down vigorously with the towel and tied it around his middle. He was a big man, no longer young—he was forty-four—with a flat, windburned face and cool gray eyes. The hair was dark, atrociously cut some five days ago by his wife, graying deeply at the temples, and his shoulders and back were hard and rope-muscled, burned dark by the tropical sun. Along his left hip and in back of his left leg were the slick, hairless whorls of old scar tissue, relic of an explosion and fire aboard a boat when he’d operated a shipyard in Puerto Rico, but the limp was long since gone.

He started below to dress and make the coffee, but paused with one foot on the companion ladder to take a last look around the horizon for squalls. They could make up very fast here in the belt of calms along the Line, even in the early morning. There were no clouds that looked suspicious at the moment— His eyes stopped suddenly and returned to the sector off the starboard bow. He’d seen something. Or had he? Yes, there it was again, a tiny speck almost over the rim of the horizon. It disappeared and came into view again. Without removing his eyes from it, he reached inside the hatch and lifted the big seven-by-fifty binoculars from the rack on the after bulkhead. It was a boat.

At that distance, even with the glasses, he could make out nothing about it except that it appeared to be two-masted and was carrying no sail at the moment. He stepped back to the binnacle and checked the heading. It was bearing about 310 degrees. He looked at it again, but it was impossible to tell whether or not anyone was on deck; it was, in fact, visible at all only when it rose to the crest of a swell. Rae would want to see it, he thought; it was the only sign of life they’d sighted since leaving Panama nearly three weeks ago. Well, it’d still be there after breakfast; nobody was going anywhere until they got some wind.

He went below and pulled on khaki shorts and sneakers. The water was boiling now. He measured out the coffee and poured it. While it was running through he wound the chronometer. He checked the barometer, giving it a little tap with his fingernail. It was steady at 29.91. He entered it in the log, along with the time, and the notation, “Calm. PC to clr. Mod. S’ly swell.”

Rae rolled over and sat up, yawning. She brushed the tawny mane of hair back from her face and grinned. “Hi, Skipper.”

He perched on the side of the bunk and kissed her. “Hi, beautiful.”

She made a deprecating gesture. “Everybody’s beautiful when he first wakes up. It’s called the blotched, rumpled, and bleary-eyed look; beauty shops can’t duplicate it. Mmmmm, I was having a wonderful dream.”

“About what?” he asked.

“Fresh water. There was a sunken tub about the size of Rhode Island, with two hundred pounds of bath salts in it—”

“Miss all that too much?”

She rumpled his still-wet hair. “Silly. Who’d want to be a clean widow when she could be a dirty sailor’s wife?”

“Watch your language, Mate. I just bathed in the Pacific Ocean.”

“God, the English language, at seven o’clock in the morning. I mean the dirty wife of a clean sailor.”

“Okay, Moonbeam McSwine. How about a cup of coffee?”

“Love it.” She swung long bare legs off the bunk and disappeared into the head, which opened off the narrow passageway between the forward and after compartments. She came out a few minutes later, face washed and hair combed, and sat down on the bunk with her legs braced against the one opposite. He handed her the mug of coffee and a lighted cigarette. “We’ve got company.”

“You mean somebody else is using our ocean?”

He nodded. “I just sighted him.”

“Who? Where?”

“Three or four miles away, to the northwest. Looks like a yacht. Yawl or ketch.”

“Where do you suppose he’s going?”

He grinned. “Nowhere at the moment. He’s becalmed too.”

“If we could get together and all whistle for wind at the same time, like a grievance committee, or a delegation—”

“This won’t last much longer. We whittled off another twenty or thirty miles last night. In a few more days we ought to be picking up the Trades.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining. Being becalmed has its points.”

“It does?” he asked. “I can only think of one.”

“That’s the one. Nobody has to be at the wheel.”

“I thought you liked to steer.”

“I do.” She smiled roguishly. “And no further comment, not at this hour of the morning.”

“You’re a hard woman. Look, I intended to run the engine a few minutes today to dry it out; if you want to, after breakfast we could run over and hail our neighbor. You like to gossip awhile, or borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Sure. But could I have a swim first? Or is he within binocular range?”

“Not unless he’s got the Mount Palomar telescope. Anyway, you could wear a suit.”

She sniffed. “Swim suit? Fine pagan you are.”

After they’d cooked and eaten breakfast and washed the dishes, he returned to the cockpit. The sun was up now, glaring brassily on the polished surface of the sea. Saracen had swung around on the swell, but he checked the bearing on the compass and located the other boat without difficulty, using the binoculars. It was off the starboard quarter. Rae came up, wrapped in a terrycloth robe and carrying a towel. “Which way is he?”

He handed her the binoculars and pointed. She searched for a moment. “Mmmmm. There he is. Is he really that small, or just so far away?”

“He’s a long way off.”

She grinned. “Far enough, I think. I can’t even tell if there’s anybody on deck.”

he went forward, hung the ladder over the side, unbelted the robe, and let it drop. She stepped across the lifeline, poised for a moment, dived cleanly, and came to the surface almost immediately with a flip of her head to clear the hair from her eyes. He walked forward along the port side, watching the water around and below her, faintly uneasy as he always was when she was down there. Motion pictures to the contrary, sharks didn’t always travel on the surface with their dorsal fins conveniently showing. “Don’t go too far from the ladder,” he warned.

“I won’t.”

She swam back and forth several times and came back to the ladder. When she had her feet on the bottom rung and the lifeline in her hands, he said, “Wait there a minute.” He turned and ran below, grabbed a saucepan, and pumped a quart of fresh water into it at the sink. She watched, puzzled, as he came hurrying back. He knelt and poured it slowly over her head, washing the salt water out of her hair. She began to laugh, and when he put down the saucepan she sprang the rest of the way up the ladder and threw her arms about him. “It’s because I love you,” he said, as wet now as she was.

She kissed him again, and then broke up into laughter once more with her face against his throat. “I was thinking of that woman the Taj Mahal was built for.”

“Why?”

“When she was alive, I bet even her husband didn’t pour a whole quart of fresh water in her hair.”

“Probably nothing but emeralds.”

“The clod.” She pushed back. “But I’d better get some clothes on. They just might have bigger binoculars over there.”

He went back to the cockpit. She dried herself with the towel, wrapped it about her head, put on the robe, and went below. The engine controls were in the cockpit. He set the choke, switched on the ignition, and turned it over with the starter. It caught on the third or fourth try, coughed once, and settled down to a steady rumble. He let it idle a few minutes to warm up, and shoved the lever ahead. Taking the wheel, he brought her around and steadied up on the approximate bearing of the other craft. Now that they were under way, the rolling lessened almost miraculously, and the slight breeze of their passage felt cool against his face. He reached for the glasses, picked up the boat again, brought Saracen a few degrees to the right to line it up dead ahead, and checked the compass course. Three-fifteen was about right.

“Honey,” he called down the hatch, “when you come up, will you bring me a cigar?”

“Right, Skipper. But don’t get there too fast. If we’re going calling, I’ve got to dress and put on my face.”

“Take your time. It’ll be a half-hour or more.”

She came on deck in about five minutes, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a white blouse. Her still-damp hair was combed back and tied with a scrap of ribbon, and she’d put on lipstick. He lit the cigar she handed him. She picked up the binoculars and turned forward, searching for the other craft. The sun struck coppery highlights in her hair as she swayed with the motion of the ketch, balancing easily on bare feet.

“Still can’t tell whether there’s anybody on deck,” she said.

“She’s a long way off yet,” Ingram replied. “And they could be asleep—” He broke off at a muttered exclamation from Rae. “What is it?”

She spoke without lowering the glasses. “I thought I saw something else. Between here and there.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It was just a speck, and it’s gone now—no. Wait. There it was again.”

“Turtle?” he asked.

“No-o. It’d have to be bigger than that; it’s too far away. Here, you take a look.”

He slid over and stood up in the cockpit. She took the wheel and repeated the compass course. “It’s almost dead ahead,” she said. “I only had a couple of quick glimpses of it, but I think it was right in line with the other boat and probably three-quarters of the way over to it.”

He put a knee on the starboard cockpit cushion and leaned to the right to get out of line with the masts as he adjusted the glasses. He picked up the other craft and studied it for a moment. Ketch-rigged, he thought, and probably a little larger than Saracen. There was no one visible on deck. She was almost abeam to the swell and rolling sluggishly. He lowered the glasses a bit and began to search the slickly heaving surface of the sea that lay between.

“See anything?” Rae asked.

“Not yet.” Then he did. It was only a speck in the distance, showing for an instant as it rose to the broad crest of a swell. It dropped from view. He marked the location in reference to the other craft and tried to hold the glasses steady to catch it when it came up again. Saracen rolled, and he lost it. “Had it,” he said. “Wait—here it is again.” It was in view for several seconds this time, and he was able to make out what it was—”Dinghy,” he announced.

“Adrift?” she asked.

“No. There’s somebody in it.”

“Odd place to go for a row.”

Ingram frowned, still studying the tiny shell. “I think he’s coming this way. Must have sighted us and started to row over.”

“That’s doing it the hard way,” she remarked with a puzzled glance at the back of his head. “Why wouldn’t he crank up the auxiliary? He must have one.”

“I don’t know,” Ingram said. “Unless it’s out of commission.”

In another few minutes the dinghy was within easy view without the glasses, continuing to advance across the slick undulations of the sea as its occupant pulled rapidly at the oars, never pausing or even slowing the beat as he turned his head from time to time to check his course. It would have been long since obvious to him that Saracen was under way and headed for him, and Ingram wondered why he didn’t merely rest on the oars and wait. Judging from the distance remaining to the other yacht, he’d already rowed well over a mile, apparently at that same racing beat. The occupant was a man, bareheaded, wearing a yellow life-jacket.

He was less than a hundred yards away now. Ingram reached down and cut the engine, and in the sudden silence they could hear the creak and rattle of oarlocks as the dinghy came on, its pace unchecked, across the closing gap. Saracen slowed and came to rest, slewing around on the swell, port side toward the approaching boat. The man looked around over his shoulder but did not hail. He was going to hit amidships. Ingram stepped quickly up on deck and knelt at the rail. He caught the bow of the dinghy and tried to fend it off, but a last explosive pull at the oars had given it too much momentum, and it bumped anyway. It swung around against Saracen’s side. The man let go the oars. One of them started to slide overboard, but Ingram grabbed it with his other hand and dropped it into the dinghy. “Okay,” he said soothingly. “Just take it easy.”

The other paid no attention. His lips moved, but he uttered no sound, his eyes reflecting some furious intensity of concentration that excluded all else. Ingram took a turn around a lifeline stanchion with the dinghy’s painter and held down a hand to help him on deck. The man caught his arm between elbow and wrist with a grip that made him wince. The other hand caught the stanchion, and he came up all in one plunging and desperate leap that kicked the dinghy backward against its painter and almost capsized it, clawing his way over the lifeline and catching the handrail along the edge of the deckhouse. The suddenness of it caught Ingram unawares, and when the man crashed into him he fell backward and sat down abruptly on the deckhouse coaming. For some reason his glance fell on the other’s hand, the one holding on to the handrail. It appeared to be infected from a small wound or cut across the knuckles, but it was the grip itself that caught his attention. The fingers were locked around the handrail so tightly they were flattened and white beneath the tan.

Hunger? he wondered. No, a starving man wouldn’t have had the strength to lunge aboard that way. More probably thirst. “Water,” he said quietly to Rae. “Not too much.”

But she had anticipated the request and was already going down the ladder. The man inched his way aft, clinging tightly to both the lifeline and the handrail along the deckhouse, as though suspended over some terrifying abyss. Ingram followed closely behind him to catch him if he stumbled. The man made it to the cockpit and sank down on one of the cushions, looked around him at the sea with a shuddering motion of his shoulders, and slumped forward with his face in his hands.

Rae came hurrying up the ladder from below with an aluminum cup partly filled with water. Ingram took it and touched the man lightly on the shoulder. “Here you go,” he said. “Just take it slow, and there’ll be more in a minute.”

The other looked up, blankly at first, and then with dawning comprehension as though aware of them for the first time, and Ingram was conscious of the thought that the face bore none of the ravages he’d always read of as associated with extreme and prolonged thirst—no cracked and blackened lips or swollen tongue. It was, in spite of the growth of golden beard, a boyish and strikingly handsome face, tanned and slender but not haggard, and unmarked by anything except perhaps exhaustion. The gray eyes were red-rimmed as if the man hadn’t slept in a long time. Besides the life-jacket he wore only white sneakers and a pair of faded khaki shorts, and it was obvious he was not only quite young, probably still in his early twenties, but powerfully built and in top physical condition.

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He reached for the water, almost indifferently, drank, and put the cup down beside him on the cockpit seat. Ingram saw with surprise that he hadn’t even finished it. He drew a hand across his face and made a shaky attempt at a smile. “Man, am I glad to see you.” Then he added abruptly, like a small boy suddenly remembering his manners, “My name’s Hughie Warriner.”

“John Ingram,” Ingram said, holding out his hand. “And my wife, Rae.” Warriner started to get up, but Rae shook her head and smiled. “No. Just rest.”

“What’s the trouble?” Ingram asked.

Warriner gestured wearily toward the other yacht rolling on the groundswell a mile away. “She’s going down. She’s been sinking for days, and I doubt she’ll last through the morning.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” the young man replied. “She just seemed to open up all over. I’ve been at the pump for a week, and almost continuously for the past two days, but I couldn’t keep up with it. And since around midnight it’s been gaining faster all the time.”

Ingram nodded. It would, as she settled lower in the water and additional seams were submerged. Warriner went on, “I thought I was done for, till I looked over here awhile ago and saw you, and then I was scared to death a breeze would come up and you’d go on without ever seeing me. I fired off a couple of flares, but nothing happened. I guess you couldn’t see ‘em that far away in sunlight—”

“It was probably while we were below eating breakfast, anyway,” Ingram said. “And the water’s up in your engine now?”

“Yes. But it hasn’t worked for a long time anyway. I tried calling you on the radio, but of course if you hadn’t seen me you wouldn’t have yours turned on, not out here. So my only chance was to try to get over to you with the dinghy before you caught a breeze.” He sighed and brushed a hand across his face again. “And am I glad you saw me.”

“Yeah, that’s cutting it a little fine.” Ingram grinned briefly and reached for the ignition key to start the engine again. “But we’d better get on over there. How many aboard?”

“Nobody,” Warriner said. “I’m alone.”

“Alone?” Involuntarily, Ingram straightened and looked out across the metallic expanse of sea toward the other yacht. Even at that distance it was obvious she was larger than Saracen. “You were trying to take her across the Pacific single-handed?”

“No. There were four of us when we left Santa Barbara…” Warriner’s voice trailed off, and he stared down at his hands. Then he went on quietly. “My wife and the other couple died ten days ago.”

2

“Oh, how awful!” Rae cried out and checked herself barely in time to keep from adding, “You poor boy!”—in spite of Warriner’s being in the neighborhood of six feet and probably not more than six or eight years younger than she was. Already drawn by the clean-cut, boyish appearance, good looks, and obvious good manners in the face of disaster, she felt a stab of almost motherly compassion and an illogical desire to take him in her arms and comfort him. “How did it happen?” Then she went on hurriedly, “But never mind. You can talk later. Can I get you something to eat? Or some more water?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Ingram, I’m all right,” Warriner replied. “But I could use a cigarette if you have one.”

“Of course.” She produced them from the pocket of her shorts and held out the lighter. “And why don’t you take off that life-jacket? It’s hot enough without wearing that thing.”

“Oh… sure.” Warriner looked down at it uncertainly and began unfastening it. He placed it on the seat beside him. “I guess I forgot I had it on.”

Ingram’s cigar had gone out. He relighted it and tossed the match overboard. “What happened?” he asked.

It was some kind of food poisoning.” Warriner stared somberly at the smoke curling upward from the cigarette forgotten between his fingers. “They all died in one afternoon, within four hours. It was horrible…” He shook his head and then went on in the same flat, mechanical voice. “No, there’s no word for what it was like, alone in the middle of the ocean with three people sick and dying, one after the other, all in different stages of the same symptoms, and not being able to do anything about it. And knowing after the first one died there was no hope for the others. My wife was the last one, just at sunset. And the terrible part of it was I wasn’t even sick. I just stood there and watched them die, like something that was happening on the other side of a glass wall I couldn’t get through.”

Rae reached down and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But don’t talk about it now. You’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Thank you,” Warriner replied, “but I’m all right. After the first couple of days I managed to snap out of it and get going again. And it was about then I began to notice the bilges were filling up with water and that it took longer every day to pump them out. Before long it was so bad I didn’t have time to think about anything but staying afloat. Maybe that was what saved me from cracking up.”

“Do you know what the poison was?” Ingram asked.

Warriner nodded. “The only thing it could have been was a can of salmon that must have spoiled. I didn’t eat any, because I don’t like salmon.”

“Had it been opened a long time?”

“No, just a few minutes before they ate it. But it wasn’t commercially canned; it was some Russ and Estelle—they were the other couple—some they put up themselves. Every year Russ goes up to the Columbia River for a week’s fishing when the Chinook run is on, and when he catches any they have some of it smoked and Estelle cans the rest because Russ claims—I mean, claimed—” Warriner took a deep breath and went on— “claimed it was better than the commercial pack. When we started out on this cruise to Papeete, they had four or five cans left over from last year, so he put them in the stores. About ten days ago—at least, I think it was ten days, I’ve lost all track of time—it was Estelle’s turn to fix dinner. It was hot and muggy and nobody was very hungry. But she happened to remember the salmon and thought she might be able to make some kind of salad out of it by cutting up pickles and onions and putting mayonnaise on it. I didn’t eat any; I always figured salmon was for cats, so I made myself a sandwich out of something.”

“And nobody noticed anything wrong with it?” Ingram didn’t know why he asked. There didn’t seem to be much you could do to change the outcome of a tragedy that had happened ten days ago. “The can wasn’t bulged or anything?”

“If it was, she didn’t notice it. Frankly, she’d had about three rum sours before she went below to fix it. We’d all had, for that matter. And if there was any odor, the onions must have covered it up.

“That was around seven p.m. The next morning between six and six-thirty Russ came up from below—I was at the wheel—and said Estelle was feeling nauseated and upset and wanted to know if I had any idea where those pills were that we’d brought along for the tourist trots. I turned the wheel over to him and went below to look for them.

“I thought they might be in the medicine closet in the head amidships, but when I got down there Estelle was in it, and I could hear her vomiting. When she came out her face was white and sweaty and she looked bad. She didn’t have much on, and when she saw it was me instead of Russ she motioned for me to look the other way and ran forward into their cabin. I found the pills and got a glass of water and called out to her. She said it was all right to come in, she was in the bunk. I gave her one. She swallowed it, but she kept rubbing her hand across her face and shaking her head. ‘Brother, that rum,’ she said. ‘It must have had a delayed-action fuse on it’ Her voice sounded funny, as if she had something stuck in her throat.

“I asked her if she was sure it was the rum, and she said, ‘I don’t know. But you look fuzzy around the edges; I can’t get you into focus.’ She held out her hand and looked at it and said, ‘God, a Picasso hand. It’s got seven fingers on it—”

“What?” Ingram interrupted. He frowned. “Wait a minute-double vision. There’s something I’ve read, or heard—”

“Botulism,” Rae said.

“What’s that?” Warriner asked. “You mean you don’t think it was the salmon?”

“Yes, it probably was the salmon,” Rae explained. “Botulism’s a very dangerous type of food poisoning that attacks the nervous system. I remember reading an article about it somewhere. I don’t remember the other symptoms, but I do recall the double vision and the trouble in speaking or swallowing.”

“Do you know what the treatment is?” Warriner asked. “We had a pretty good medicine chest and I tried everything I could think of, but if it turns out that some simple thing we had aboard could have saved them …”

Rae shook her head. “You can put your mind at rest about that. I don’t think there is any treatment except an antitoxin, which nobody’d have in a first-aid kit. Even if you’d been an M. D. you couldn’t have done anything for them.”

“Oh. I guess that helps. A little, anyway.” Warriner went on. “She looked bad, as I said, but I didn’t realize then how sick she was. I guess she didn’t either. Anyway, about that time we took two or three heavy rolls and I heard the sails begin to slat, so I went back on deck. I thought the wind had died out again and we’d have to sheet everything in—we’d been becalmed off and on for the past two days, just a capful of breeze now and then from all around the compass. But when I got up in the cockpit, that wasn’t it; Russ had left the wheel. He was hanging over the rail, vomiting, and she’d come up into the wind.

“He said he thought he’d got a touch of it too. Even then it’d never occurred to any of us it could be serious; it was just a joke, like the turista. I told him where the pills were, and to go on back and turn in and not to relieve me at eight unless he was sure he was all over it. He went below. The breeze held on, fairly steady out of the west; we were making at least four knots, and not too far off the course we wanted, so I didn’t want to leave the wheel, even when it was eight o’clock and he didn’t come up.

“About eight-thirty I heard somebody moving around in the galley and decided at least one of them was feeling better, but it was Lillian—my wife. She brought me a cup of coffee, and one for herself, and was sitting in the cockpit drinking it when all of a sudden she doubled over with a cramp in her stomach. She ran below to the head. Nobody was able to take the wheel, and Orpheus was always a cranky boat; she wouldn’t steer herself on any point of sailing. So I doused everything and went below to see how they were. Russ and Estelle were still in their bunks, when they weren’t trying to get back and forth to the head. And now Russ was complaining that everything looked fuzzy, and he was having trouble talking. Lillian didn’t have any symptoms like that yet; she was just nauseated and crampy. But I was beginning to be scared, real scared, thinking of all that empty ocean between us and a doctor. It almost had to be some kind of food poisoning, and everybody decided it must have been the salmon because I hadn’t eaten any and I wasn’t sick—at least, I wasn’t so far. I got the medicine kit out and started through the first-aid handbook that came with it. It was no help; there wasn’t anything about food poisoning in it at all, just a lot of jazz about what to do if somebody swallows lye or iodine or something, and how to treat burns and fainting spells and broken bones.

“By ten o’clock Lillian was beginning to have the same symptoms, the fuzzy vision and difficulty in swallowing or talking. The breeze had died out, and it was like an oven below deck with the sun beating down. Russ and Estelle were having trouble breathing. I gave up pawing through the medicines long enough to rig an awning over the cockpit, intending to move them up there, but by now they were too sick to make it up the ladder. I couldn’t carry them, not with the boat rolling the way she was, lying becalmed. I rigged wind-chutes, which was stupid, because there wasn’t a breath of air moving, but by this time I was so panicky I didn’t know what I was doing. I gave them the turista pills, and aspirin, and paregoric, and I don’t remember what else, but by noon neither Russ nor Estelle could swallow anything any more. They couldn’t even talk. All they could do was he there and fight for breath.

“Russ died a little after three in the afternoon. I hadn’t thought there could be anything more horrible in the world than standing there listening to the two of them fighting for breath in that stifling cabin and not being able to do anything to help them, but there was. It was when I realized that only one of them was making that noise now; Russ had stopped. Which meant there was no hope for the others either. Estelle was unconscious by that time, so she didn’t know he was dead. Lillian was still conscious and just beginning to fight for breath, but she was in our cabin, aft of the doghouse, so she didn’t know either.

“Then Estelle died, less than an hour after Russ. The rest of the day is kind of mixed up and run together; I can only remember crazy pieces of it—Lillian asking me how the others were, and I’d say I’d go see, and I’d go into the forward cabin where they were both dead and then come back and say they were getting much better now and that she’d be over the worst of it in a little while. Then I’d go out of the cabin to pray, so she wouldn’t see me. I remember going up on deck once; maybe it would work better up there in the open. I hadn’t prayed for anything since I was a kid, and I guess I didn’t know how; it struck me once that it seemed like I was trying to negotiate with God, or strike a bargain, or something. I kept saying two of them were gone, couldn’t He leave one?

“Lillian died a little after six. When the sound of her breathing stopped, the silence was like something screaming in my ears, and I let go of her and ran up on deck and the sun was just going down. The sky was red in the west, and the sea was like blood, and everywhere there was that terrible silence that went on and on and on as if it was pressing in on me from all around the horizon…” Warriner dropped his face in his hands.

Tears were overflowing Rae’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Ingram said, conscious at the same time of something that disturbed him. It was the word theatrical intruding on the perimeter of his mind, and he was angry with himself at this apparent callousness. Try it on your own stiff upper lip, he thought, before you throw any rocks; try ten days of it without hearing another voice and you might get a little purple about it too. He wished uncomfortably that he could think of something to add to the simple “I’m sorry,” but nothing was going to help the boy except the passage of time. He reached toward the ignition key to start the engine. “But we’d better shag over there and see if we can salvage some of your gear before she goes under.”

Warriner shook his head. “There’s nothing worth going after. It’s all ruined by the water—radio, sextant, chronometer, everything—”

“How about clothes?”

“These will do. Anyway, I don’t think I could go back aboard. You understand, don’t you? It isn’t only their dying. Remember, they all died below deck. Can you imagine what it was like, what I had to do?”

Ingram nodded.

Warriner’s face twisted. “Talk about the dignity of death, and last respects to the dead—pallbearers and bronze caskets and music and flowers. I dragged my wife’s body up a companion ladder with a rope—”

“Stop it!” Rae cried out. “You’ve got to quit thinking about it!”

“I understand,” Ingram said. “But you don’t have to go aboard; I’ll take care of it, if you’ll just tell me where to find things—”

“But there’s not anything, I tell you!”

“We ought to get your passport,” Ingram pointed out. “And whatever money you have aboard. We’re bound for Papeete, and you’ll need it for your passage home from there. Also, there’s the log and ship’s papers—”

Warriner gestured impatiently. “The log and ship’s papers and passport and money are all pulp and sloshing around in the bilges in three feet of water. If I haven’t already pumped them overboard.”

“I see,” Ingram said, wondering if he did. “But there’s another thing. Is she insured?”

“John.” Something in Rae’s voice made him turn. She went on sweetly, but with a glint in her eyes he’d never seen before. “I don’t think we’re being very hospitable, or very considerate. Mr. Warriner needs sleep more than anything at the moment, so I’m going to fix a bunk for him. If you’ll just come with me and move those sailbags, dear.”

She went down the ladder. Ingram followed, conscious of the rigidity of her back as she traversed the rolling cabin and went through the passage at the forward end. The narrow compartment in the eyes of the boat held two bunks, slanted inward toward each other like the sides of a V, but was used only as a locker now. There were cases of food, unopened buckets of paint and varnish, and coils of line, all neatly stowed, and the bunks themselves were piled with bags of sails. There was no hatch above, only a ventilator, and the compartment was dimly lighted by the two small portholes above the bunks.

She pulled the door shut and came close to him. “John Ingram!” It was a whisper, but forceful. “I’m ashamed of you; I never realized you could be this insensitive. Can’t you see that boy’s on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown? For heaven’s sake, stop asking him questions and let’s try to get him to sleep.”

“Well, sure, honey,” he protested. “I realize what he’s been through. But we ought to make some attempt to salvage what we can—”

“He doesn’t want to go back on there. I’d think you could understand that.”

“He doesn’t have to. I told him I’d go.”

“But why? He said there wasn’t anything worth trying to save, didn’t he?”

“I know. But obviously water wouldn’t ruin everything. Clothes, for instance. Also, he contradicts himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“The radio, remember? He said it’d been ruined by the water. But he’d just got through telling us he called us on it.”

She sighed. “Why do men always have to be so literal? Do you think he’s some kind of machine? John, dear, he lost his wife and his two friends all in one afternoon, and then spent the next ten days utterly alone on a sinking boat, and he probably hasn’t closed his eyes for a week. I’d be doing well to remember my own name, unless I had it written down somewhere.”

“All right—” Ingram began.

“Shhhhh! Not so loud.”

“Okay. But you’d think he’d at least want to bring off some of her things, wouldn’t you? And there was another thing I was about to explain to him. If that boat’s insured, he’s going to have a hell of a time trying to collect, with no logbook and just his unsupported word she was in sinking condition when he left her—in a dead calm, with no weather making up. The underwriters are going to ask for a statement from me, and I can’t corroborate it. How can I? I’ll just have to tell ‘em she was afloat when I saw her. And that I hadn’t even been aboard and didn’t know how much water she was taking.”

“He said she probably wouldn’t last through the morning, and we’re not going anywhere in this calm, so well still be in sight when she goes down. But let him get some sleep!”

“Sure. God knows, he probably needs it.” Still vaguely dissatisfied, he tossed the sailbags into the other bunk and threw a lashing on them. He went back to the cockpit. Warriner was slumped on the starboard seat with the binoculars beside him, as though he’d been looking at the other yacht. Sunlight struck golden fire in his hair, which had been crew-cut originally but had grown long over his ears. Handsome kid, Ingram thought, and then wondered if that could be the reason for his—well, not distrust, exactly. That was overstating it. Call it reservation.

“You asked me if she was insured,” Warriner said. “I’m sorry to say she’s not. We thought the premium was too high for the risk involved. And also, that if she was lost, we probably would be too.”

“Is she pretty old?”

“Yes. Over twenty years. I guess we got stung when we bought her.”

“You didn’t have her surveyed?”

“Well—yes. That is, not by a professional, but a friend of mine who’s real savvy about boats.”

Ingram nodded but refrained from any comment. Under the circumstances, it was too much like kicking a man when he was down to elaborate on the foolishness of buying a twenty-year-old yacht without a professional survey, especially since this was a little on the self-evident side at the moment. “You don’t know what caused her to open up that way? Have any bad weather?”

Warriner shook his head. “Not recently. That is, except for a few squalls, which never lasted very long. It was just age and general unsoundness.”

Ingram was struck by a sudden thought. “You say you were bound from California to Papeete—aren’t you pretty far east? Seems to me you’d have crossed the Line nearly a thousand miles west of here.”

“We were taking it by stages. Down the Mexican coast to La Paz, and then by way of Clipperton Island.” Warriner made an attempt at a smile. “Look, I’m sorry I got dumped on you this way. But I can pull my weight, and it will shorten the watches. And I’ll keep out of your hair as much as possible; it’s not much fun having a third party around.”

“Forget it,” Ingram said, feeling uncomfortable for some reason. It was the first time he’d ever heard of a shipwreck victim apologizing for his existence, and he tried again to put his finger on exactly what there was about this boy that he couldn’t quite like. There didn’t seem to be any answer. “Hell, we’re just happy we came along when we did.”

Warriner made no reply. Ingram picked up the glasses, braced himself against the mizzen boom, and searched out the other yacht. She was near enough now to make out details on deck, but he couldn’t tell whether she was any lower in the water than she had been. She wasn’t down by the head or stern, but there was no doubt she had water in her, and plenty of it, from the drunken way she lurched on the swell, taking too long to come back each time she rolled. She had a short, rather high deckhouse with windows rather than portholes located near amidships, and in silhouette was vaguely reminiscent of a motor-sailer rather than a conventional sailing yacht. Dumpy-looking, he decided, and probably cranky as hell and slow. Big auxiliary, no doubt, lots of greenhouse for cocktail parties, and probably built for somebody who never used the sails except when he ran out of gas. Still, Warriner probably had upwards of $30,000 invested in her, and it was a sad way for a boat to end. “She’s still on an even keel,” he said, without lowering the glasses. “You sure we couldn’t gain on it, by pumping and bailing together—at least enough to start locating the leaks and calking ‘em?”

Warriner shook his head. “It’s hopeless. It’s been pouring in since around midnight. Nearly six inches in seven hours.”

Ingram glanced down at him and then returned to his scrutiny of the other boat without comment, still aware of that nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Something about the whole thing disturbed him, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. Just what was it? Warriner was certainly in a position to know how much water was coming into her. And when you stopped to take a good look at it, saving her was only a pipe dream. Even if they could pump her out enough to plug a few of the leaks, the kid would never make land in her alone. She was too big for one man to handle, even without the necessity of being at the pump twelve to fifteen hours a day.

3

The sun was hotter now. He turned, searching the horizon for any darkening of the surface of the sea that would indicate the beginnings of a breeze. Rae came up the ladder. “Your bunk’s all ready, Mr. Warriner. Try to sleep until this time tomorrow.”

Warriner smiled. “Please call me Hughie. And I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You don’t have to. Just get some rest.”

“In a little while. For some reason, I don’t feel sleepy at all.”

She nodded. “You’ve been wound too tight for too long. But I know how to fix that.” She disappeared down the ladder and came back in a minute with a bottle containing a little over an ounce of whisky. She poured it into the cup that was still beside him. “There’s just about enough here to do it.” He drained it and accepted the cigarette she held out. “By the time you finish that,” she said, “you’re going to collapse all over. Just try to make it to the bunk when you feel yourself start to go.”

“Thank you,” Warriner said. “You’re very nice.”

She tossed the bottle overboard and perched on the edge of the deckhouse to light a cigarette for herself. The bottle landed with a faint splash just off the port quarter, rolled over as a swell passed under it, and started to fill. It righted itself, its neck out of water. Ingram glanced at it indifferently, and then forward, conscious that Warriner’s dinghy was bumping as Saracen rose and fell. They’d have to cast it adrift; there was no room to stow it on deck, and of course they couldn’t tow it. He looked around and was about to mention this when he stopped, arrested by something in the other’s face.

Warriner was staring past him with an almost frozen intensity, apparently at something in the water. Ingram turned, but could see nothing except the bottle, which was about to sink. It had rolled onto its side again as another swell upset it, and water was flowing into its mouth. A few bubbles came up, and it went under. Puzzled, Ingram glanced back at Warriner. The other had risen from his seat and leaned forward, clutching the port lifeline with a white-knuckled grip as he stared down at the bottle falling slowly through sun-lighted water as clear as air. Drops of sweat stood out on his forehead, and his mouth was locked shut as though he were stifling, with an effort of will, some anguished outcry welling up inside him. The bottle was six feet down now, ten, fifteen, but still clearly visible as it continued its unhurried slide into the deepening blue and fading light beyond. Warriner’s eyes closed, and Ingram sensed the effort he was making to tear himself away from whatever hell he saw in an innocent and commonplace bottle falling into the depths of the sea, but they came open again almost immediately, still full of the same hypnotic compulsion and horror, like those of a bird impaled on the freezing stare of a snake.

Ingram opened his mouth to ask what the matter was, but caught Rae’s eyes on him. She shook her head. They both looked seaward and in a moment heard Warriner sit down again. The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Probably doesn’t know we even saw it, Ingram reflected. But what was it? Terror? Terror of what? For some reason he was thinking of the way Warriner had come aboard, the trancelike stare, the convulsive lunge onto the deck, and the way his fingers had flattened themselves around the handrail.

“Breeze coming!” Rae called out suddenly. “Anybody for Papeete?”

Off to the south the surface of the sea was beginning to darken under the riffles of an advancing cat’s-paw of wind. Ingram sprang on deck and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail. Rae had run forward and was breaking out the jib. Long months of practice had made them a smoothly functioning team, and by the time they could feel the faint movement of air against their faces a cloud of billowing white Orion was mounting against the sky. Rae came aft to take the wheel. The mainsail filled. Saracen began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, and when she had gathered enough way to come about Ingram looked around and nodded. Rae brought the wheel hard over; she came up into the wind, hung for an instant, and fell off on the port tack, toward the southwest and Tahiti.

For a moment he had forgotten Warriner, but when he turned from setting up the mainsheet to trim the jib, he found the other already hauling on it. Warriner threw it on the cleat and straightened. “How about the mizzen?”

Ingram nodded and began taking off the gaskets. “Might as well get everything on her; the breeze might last for a while. But you go ahead and turn in.”

* * *

Warriner smiled. “I think I will, as soon as we get this up.” He seemed to have recovered completely from the horror of a few minutes ago. They hoisted the mizzen and trimmed the sheet. Ingram leaned over to look in the binnacle. “Can we make 235?” he asked Rae.

“Easy,” she replied. “We’re to windward of that now.” She came right a little. “Here we are—230 … 233 … 235.”

Ingram glanced aloft at the strands of ribbon on the shrouds and started the mainsheet a little. Saracen heeled slightly under a puff and began to gather way. He turned to Warriner. “We’re going to have to cast your dinghy adrift. No room to stow it.”

Warriner nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

Ingram loosed the painter from the lifeline stanchion, coiled it, dropped it into the dinghy, and gave the boat a push away from the side. It drifted back and began to fall behind in the wake, riding like a cork over the broad undulations of the swell. Warriner had turned and was staring toward the other yacht, which was off the starboard quarter now that they had come about. The dinghy was a hundred yards astern, growing smaller and looking lost and forlorn in the immensity of the sea.

“Well, if it’s all right with you, I guess I’ll turn in,” he said at last. “If the breeze holds, I can take over tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Rae said. “You’d better rest for a couple of days. There’ll be something for you to eat when you wake up.”

“It’ll be pretty hot down there,” Ingram added, “but if you leave the door open you’ll get a little circulation of air from the ventilator.”

Warriner nodded and went down the ladder. He paused once to turn for a last look at the other boat before his head disappeared below the level of the hatch. When Ingram looked around at Rae, her eyes were misted with tears. He leaned forward and peered down the hatch. Warriner was going through the passage into the forward compartment. He couldn’t hear them if they spoke in normal tones.

He slid back close beside her. “What do you make of it?”

“That thing about the bottle?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But grief does strange things—grief and complete isolation.”

“But just a sinking bottle—”

“Obviously it wasn’t a bottle he was seeing.” She paused, her eyes fixed moodily on the compass card. Then she went on, “What’s a sea burial like?”

“I’ve never seen one, thank God, but from what I’ve read, you sew the body in canvas and weight it with something. Why?”

“I’m not sure, but …” She gestured helplessly.

“I think I know what you mean,” Ingram said. “But I’m not sure I agree with you.” Wrapped in white Orion, with the water this clear and the boat lying dead in the water above them, the bodies would still be visible a long way down if you wanted to torture yourself by leaning over the side and watching them disappear into the dark down there. “But that’s only morbid. This was worse. Horror—I don’t know what you’d call it.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But being utterly alone afterward …” Her voice trailed off. The breeze had dropped to a whisper. Saracen ghosted through the bald spot for a few yards, the sails beginning to slat; then it picked up again, only to die out once more in less than fifteen minutes. Saracen rolled heavily, booms aswing. Ingram sheeted them in. He stood up, still disturbed, and annoyed at himself because he didn’t know why, and trained the binoculars on the other yacht. Then, with a gesture of impatience, he made up his mind.

“I’m going aboard her.”

Rae looked up. “Why?”

“I don’t know. There’s something about the whole damned thing I can’t quite swallow; no matter how I turn it, it won’t go down. Look, Rae, anybody who managed to get this far from land in a boat without killing himself must be a sailor, and that’s not the way a sailor abandons one. Just because somebody else comes along going in the same direction—like a hitch-hiker. You’d bring something off, or you’d go back for what you could salvage.”

“You don’t believe she’s sinking?”

“All I know is she’s still afloat.” He continued to study the other yacht. As far as he could tell, there was no change in her trim or amount of freeboard. Well, it didn’t mean anything, actually; it could be hours, or even days, before she went under. He was probably being silly.

“Did he say whether she was insured or not?” she asked.

“He says she’s not.”

“Then it’d be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it, just going off and leaving her in the middle of the ocean?”

He frowned. “Yes, but that’s still not what I mean. If she’s leaking at all, he’d never make port in her alone; she’s too big for singlehanded sailing, to say nothing of being at the pump all the time. He almost has to abandon her, but not the way he did. I keep getting the feeling he doesn’t want anybody to go aboard.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Admittedly, it doesn’t make any sense. But look—you’ll notice he didn’t turn in until we were under way. And had cast his dinghy adrift.”

“That was probably just coincidence.”

“Sure. It could be.”

“You’re going to put our dinghy over?” Rae asked.

“No.” He turned, searching for the other one. He could still see it when it crested a swell, several hundred yards astern. “Well pick his up again. No strain, if we get another breeze.”

Saracen had begun to swing around on the swell, to a southerly and then a southeasterly heading. Ingram stood up again with the glasses and could see the water beginning to darken once more to the southward. He looked at his watch. It had been nearly thirty minutes since Warriner had gone below. He slipped down the ladder, crossed to the passage going into the forward compartment, and looked in. Warriner lay on his back, his eyes closed, breathing heavily.

He came back to the cockpit just as the breeze began to stir again. It was out of the south, to starboard on the heading they were on now, and the other yacht lay perhaps a mile and a half away on the port bow, with the dinghy somewhere in between. Saracen began to move ahead. He motioned for Rae to steady up where she was, and stepped forward to search out the dinghy. In a moment he saw it top a swell almost dead ahead. There was a long boathook lashed atop the deckhouse. He slid it free and looked down to windward, hoping the breeze would continue strong enough to give them steerage-way. As far as he could see the surface was riffled and dark. He stepped back to the break of the deckhouse and spoke quietly to Rae. “See it?”

She nodded. “Now and then. When it comes up.”

“Good. We’ll take it on the starboard side.”

Five minutes passed. The breeze faltered but came on again before they lost steerageway. It was less than fifty yards away now. Ingram motioned her a little to port and stood ready with the boathook. The dinghy began to slide past along the starboard side, less than ten feet off. He hooked it neatly at the bow, hauled it inward, and got hold of the painter. He led it aft and made it fast with a grin at Rae. “Nice going.”

It was a run almost downwind now to the other yacht. He started the main and mizzen sheets and studied her through the glasses. She was lying on a westerly heading, abeam to the breeze. “Right just a little,” he said to Rae. “Well come up astern and lay to about a hundred yards off.”

The gap began to close slowly, and then more slowly as the breeze faltered. It stopped altogether, and the sea became like heaving billows of silk, blinding off to starboard with the glare of the sun. Then, just before Saracen began to yaw on the swell, it came on again. The sails filled. The distance was less than a half-mile now.

“I don’t like that sluggish way she rolls,” Rae said.

“She’s got water in her, all right,” Ingram agreed.

“Are you sure it’s safe to go aboard?”

“Sure. She won’t capsize, with all that keel under her. And she won’t go under all at once.”

“But suppose you’re below? You might get trapped.”

“I won’t go below if she’s that close. I can tell when I get on her.”

They were still over two hundred yards away when the breeze died again. Saracen drifted forward a few yards and began to wallow as she slewed around. Ingram surveyed the remaining distance with exasperation, and searched the horizon on all sides. “Slick as a bald head,” he said and sheeted the booms in. “This’ll have to do. I’m going aboard.”

“Why not start the engine?” she asked.

“He might wake up.”

“I doubt it.” Then she caught his meaning. “Why? What difference does it make if he does?”

He hesitated; then he shrugged. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you on here alone with him. Unless he’s asleep, I mean.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“I don’t know. It’s stupid, I realize, but there’s just something about him I don’t quite buy. Not till I know more about him.”

“Well, of all the worriers.”

He grunted. “You’re probably right. But let him sleep, anyway.” He loosed the dinghy’s painter and hauled the boat up alongside. Before he stepped down into it he took a careful look around the horizon for squalls. It could be highly dangerous if one made up suddenly while Rae was alone, with all sail on her. There was nothing, however, that looked even remotely suspicious. “If you get another whisper of breeze,” he said, “work her on down and come about off the stern. I won’t be long.”

“Right. You will be careful, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Wait. Don’t you want to put on that life-jacket?” It was still lying where Warriner had taken it off.

He grinned. “What for?” Nobody could capsize a dinghy in a sea like this. At the same time, he wondered why Warriner had been wearing it. Timing himself with Saracen’s roll, he stepped lightly down into the dinghy and pushed away from the side.

It rode like a chip on the oily groundswell, and reflected sunlight glared in his face as he shipped the oars and began pulling toward the other yacht. As he drew nearer, he could see the sails were sloppily furled and that the deck was littered with an unseamanlike mess of uncoiled and unstowed lines. The main boom rested on its gallows frame, but the mizzen swung forlornly back and forth, banging against its slackened sheets. She was at least six inches below her normal waterline, he thought, and her movements were heavy and sluggish, like those of a dying animal, as she lurched over and back under the punishing rays of the sun. He felt sorry for her, as he always did for a boat in trouble. He changed course slightly to pass under her stern and come up on her starboard side. Her name and home port were spelled out in ornate black letters edged with gilt against the white paint of her transom.

Orpheus

SANTA BARBARA

He was still some twenty yards away, rounding her stern, when he heard a crash from somewhere inside the hull, followed in a moment by another. Apparently something had come adrift, a drawer or a locker, and was slamming back and forth on the water inside her. He pulled quickly up along the starboard side and, as she rolled down on the swell, caught one of the lifeline stanchions. After shipping the oars, he gathered up the painter and stepped on deck. He was near amidships, opposite the doghouse. As he made the painter fast he could hear the flow and splash of water inside her hull, sweeping from side to side as she rolled. He didn’t like the feel of her under his feet. Better make it short, he thought.

Aft of the doghouse was a slightly raised deck, enclosed by a low railing, which extended back almost to the mizzen-mast and the helmsman’s cockpit. There was a skylight in the center of this, apparently above the after cabin. It was closed and secured. He stepped aft, feeling her unsteady lurch as she rolled, ducked under the main boom, and looked into the doghouse hatch. There were only four steps leading down, since the top of it was quite high above the deck outside. There was no water here, but the deck was covered with a litter of charts and scratch pads and pencils from a drawer that had slid out of the chart table on the starboard side. He came on down the steps and looked quickly around. The port side and that part of the starboard side forward of the chart table were taken up with settees covered with some white plastic material. On racks above the chart table were a radiotelephone and radio direction-finder.

Aft, beside the steps leading up on deck, was a low doorway, and amidships at the forward end was another. The latter was open. He stepped over to it and peered through. Steps led downward to the main cabin, which was in ruin. At the after end, on the port side, were a sink, stove, refrigerator, and stowage cupboards, while to starboard was a table surrounded on two sides by a leather-covered settee. Everything was drowned, and the cabin was filled with the dank odor of wetness and decay. Water at least two feet deep swirled back and forth, crashing into the stove and refrigerator and settee and dripping from the bulkheads and ceiling, all intermingled with rolling cans from some burst locker, sodden articles of clothing, and books from an emptied bookshelf. It was sickening. At the forward end was a doorway which probably opened into a lavatory, and to the left of it a curtained passage to the forward cabin. He stepped down and splashed through the swirling debris to the passage and peered in. The two bunks were rumpled and dripping, and water rocked back and forth between them. It was just as Warriner had said. He wondered what he was looking for.

He turned and hurried back to the doghouse. Through the windows he caught a quick glimpse of Saracen gracefully riding the groundswell two hundred yards away, still becalmed. The mere sight of her was comforting after the ruin below. The door at the aft end of the doghouse was closed and secured with a hasp, through the staple of which a pair of dividers had been dropped. He pulled the dividers out, and as he turned to toss them on the chart table his eye fell on the ship’s log, behind a clip on the bulkhead above it. He frowned, puzzled. Warriner had apparently been telling the truth otherwise, so why had he lied about that? He’d said the logbook was pulp, sloshing around in the bilges. And that the radio and chronometer and sextant were all ruined. Nothing up here was wet at all. And as water rose in the cabins below, wouldn’t he have brought his passport and money and other valuables up here where they’d stay dry? It would be the natural thing to do. They might be in one of the other drawers of the chart table. Well, he’d look for them in a minute. He pushed open the door and peered down into the after cabin.

A dark-haired woman who appeared at first glance to be completely nude was huddled on the far end of the right-hand bunk, her back against the bulkhead at the foot of it and her legs drawn up under her chin as if to get as far as possible from the door. One hand was up to her mouth and her eyes were wide with fear, which changed to amazement and disbelief as she stared into his face. She cried out, “Stop! Stop, it’s not him!” And in the same fraction of a second Ingram saw the other one reflected in the panel mirror mounted on the after bulkhead between the bunks. A man was standing just below him, to the left of the steps leading down, a big man, naked from the waist up, with a broad, beard-stubbled face smeared pink with diluted blood running down from a wound somewhere in the sodden mess of his hair. In his upraised hand was a billet of wood, apparently the end of a drawer he’d pulled from under one of the bunks and smashed. He’d been poised to bring it down on Ingram’s head, and when the girl’s piercing outcry stopped him he tried to recover. At the same moment Orpheus lurched over to starboard, and he fell into the water washing back and forth across the cabin sole. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the water with his back against the other bunk, brushed a hand across his bloody face, and looked up at Ingram with a hard and bitter grip.

“Welcome to Happy Valley,” he said. “Where’s the All-American psycho?”

“Get on deck!” Ingram snapped. “Ill be back.” He whirled and plunged up the steps into the open, ducked under the main boom, and dropped into the dinghy. His hands fumbled as he loosed the painter. Two explosive strokes with the oars brought him into the clear past Orpheus’s stern, where he could see across to Saracen. Her position was unchanged except that she had swung around and was lying broadside to.

Rae was alone in the cockpit.

He breathed softly and dug in the oars, feeling sweat begin to run down into his eyes. He came up the broad slope of a swell and ran down the other side like some frenzied, two-legged waterbeetle in flight for its life. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all right. There’s no reason the crazy son of a bitch would wake up. Then, across a hundred and fifty yards of open water, he heard the growl of the starter. Rae was coming to pick him up.

4

He tried to signal to her. At the risk of capsizing, he stood up in the dinghy and frantically sliced the air in horizontal sweeps of his opened hands, but she was bent over the controls now and didn’t see. The starter growled again, and this time the engine started with a coughing backfire that spread gooseflesh between his shoulderblades. One of his oars started to slide overboard. He grabbed it and dropped to the seat again. Muscles writhed across his back as he dug them in and lunged, flinging the dinghy up the side of the swell. He was to blame. She’d been watching with the glasses and had seen the way he’d exploded out of the doghouse and run across the deck, and, knowing only that there was something urgent about his getting back, was trying to help. Saracen was swinging now, under way and foreshortened as she began to bear down upon him. The gap was only a hundred yards, and closing. Some of the fear began to leave him. It was going to be all right. He heard her cut back the throttle and drop the engine out of gear. Then when he turned his head again he felt himself grow cold all over. There was a spot of golden color just to the left of the lined-up masts. It was Warriner’s head. He was standing on the companion ladder, looking aft.

Nothing seemed to move. There was a piercing clarity about every detail of the scene—the foreshortened hull pointed toward him, the little curl of bow wave under her forefoot, the tall spires of Orion achingly white against the sky, and just this side of Rae’s face that spot of gold like a medallion poised on edge above the cambered top of the deckhouse—but the whole thing was frozen like a single frame of motion-picture film with the projector jammed. Saracen was seventy-five yards away, with Warriner’s head just beginning to turn. A few seconds either way could decide it, but they were something over which he no longer had any control.

Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he actually had forgotten the people he’d locked in there to drown. Or if he’d really been asleep, maybe his reaction time would be off just enough to make the difference— The film jerked then, between the down-thrust oars and the stroke, and the projector began to run. Warriner’s head swung on around, and he saw the dinghy and the sinking Orpheus beyond. He leaped the rest of the way into the cockpit, and his figure merged with Rae’s.

Ingram heard the engine race, still out of gear. It slowed and came back up again almost in the same instant, with the load on it now. Which way would he turn? At the risk of a fraction of a second’s raggedness in the beat of the oars, he had to turn his head and look. Saracen loomed over him less than four lengths away, the gap closing faster now as she gathered speed, but she was already beginning to swing to starboard. He dug in his left oar and spun the dinghy around almost at right angles to cut across her course.

Saracen, in a hard-over right turn, was on his left now. He could see Rae fighting to reach the ignition switch. Warriner, holding the wheel with one hand, threw her back. She fell to her knees on the short section of deck aft of the cockpit, but sprang up and flung herself on him again. Ingram’s eyes stung with sweat, and the oars were bending as he threw the dinghy forward. The engine roared at full throttle; Saracen’s bow was swinging off faster now than he was gaining, but the stern was still coming down toward him. Twenty yards … fifteen … The locked and struggling figures in the cockpit suddenly burst apart. Warriner’s fist swung, and Ingram saw her fall. She lay in a crumpled heap on the afterdeck, unmoving, one arm dangling over the stern as if she were calling out for help. Ten yards … four … three … The turn was completed now, and the stern was beginning to draw away from him. He gave one more desperate heave on the oars, stood up, and flung himself at the rail. The dinghy kicked backward under him. His outstretched hands were two feet short, and then he was in the churning white water under the quarter.

He was already behind the propeller, or he might have lost an arm. He felt the solid kick of the water thrown back from it whirl him over, and then his head was above surface and Saracen’s stern was ten yards away. It dipped as her bow rose to an oncoming swell, and for an instant he could see Rae’s figure face down on the afterdeck, her hair very dark against the bleached and weathered teak. “Jump!” he yelled. “Jump! Get off!” She lay motionless.

For the first time in his life at sea he completely lost his head. It lasted for only a moment, and when he realized what he was doing, that he was threshing madly at the water, trying to swim after Saracen’s receding stern, he got control of the panic inside him and brought himself up. Lifting his face above water, he roared out once more with all his remaining breath, “Jump, Rae! Jump!” The limp and dangling arm was his only answer. She was either badly hurt or unconscious.

The dinghy was behind him. Both oars had slipped overboard. He found them, threw them back in, and lifted himself in over the transom. He was more scared than he had ever been in his life, and the whole scene came to him through the winy haze of a desire to get his hands on Warriner and kill him, but there was no time to give way to futile emotion. He whirled the dinghy about and sent it racing across the two hundred yards of open water toward Orpheus, trying not even to think except of what he had to do, as if it were an exercise. Saracen was going straight away, and he could still see Rae’s figure on the stern.

He turned his head. The man and woman had come on deck and were standing just aft of the doghouse, watching him. He shot the dinghy across the few remaining yards, slammed into Orpheus’s port side, and pulled in the oars. Neither of them had made a move to take the painter. He grabbed it himself, leaped on deck, and made it fast. “Have you got any glasses?” he asked.

The man grinned bleakly. “You didn’t seem to do any better than we did. Maybe you have to be crazy yourself to outguess him.”

Ingram caught himself just short of smashing him in the face—not because the man was already hurt or because he was probably in no way to blame, but merely because it would waste time. “Binoculars?” he asked again. “Where are they?”

The man jerked a thumb toward the doghouse. “Rack, just inside the door.” But the woman had already taken a step down the ladder and reached for them. Ingram lifted them from her hand without thanks, without even seeing her, and whirled, bringing them to bear on Saracen. She was still going straight away on the same course. As he adjusted the knob, she leaped sharply into focus, every detail distinct. Rae still lay huddled on the afterdeck, as far as he could tell in the same position. Warriner was at the wheel, looking forward, apparently into the binnacle. Maybe he had forgotten she was there. Then Ingram realized the futility of any conjecture as to what went on in Warriner’s mind. “Have you got a spare compass?” he asked without lowering the binoculars. “Boat compass, or a telltale in one of the cabins—”

“There’s a little one in a box in the chartroom,” the man said.

“Get it,” Ingram ordered, “and set it in the dinghy. Then put your azimuth ring on the steering compass and keep calling out the bearing of that boat.”

“And what’s all that jazz for?” the man asked. He hadn’t moved.

Ingram lowered the glasses then and looked at him for the first time. “You do what I tell you to, you son of a bitch,” he said, “and do it now. My wife’s still on there. If he throws her overboard, I want to know where. And if I don’t get to her in time because I didn’t have a course, and a compass in that dinghy, you’ll go next.”

“Just a minute, friend—” the man began, but Ingram had already turned away and locked the glasses on Saracen again. She was at least a half-mile away; he could still see Rae lying on deck, but less clearly now. He heard the woman say, “Oh, stop it; just do as he says. You find the compass, and I’ll get the azimuth ring.” He paid no attention. He was trying to make a cold appraisal of the several possibilities while at the same time struggling in the back of his mind with the dark animal of fear. This might be the last time he would ever see her, this dwindling spot of color fading away toward the outer limit of binoculars, but that was something he couldn’t think about. If he lost his head, there was no chance at all.

She must be still unconscious, because as far as he could tell she hadn’t moved. If Warriner threw her over now, while she was still out, she’d drown. The longer he waited, the more chance there was she’d be conscious and able to swim, but on the other hand, the farther out she was, the more it increased the odds against finding her in time, even with a compass course to follow. In a dinghy you were too low in the water, with a groundswell that was running higher than your head. And he had to see when it happened.

It was already growing difficult to make out the deck. He was too low. He tore his eyes away from the glasses long enough to leap up on the doghouse and brace his legs against the doomed and melancholy rolling of the boat, and for an instant he was conscious again of the forlorn banging of her gear and the rushing sound of water inside the hull. If he got her back, they’d only drown together when this derelict finally gave up and died. Well, you could only take one thing at a time.

Somebody was calling him from the cockpit. It was the woman. “Bearing 240 degrees.”

“Thanks,” he said, without looking around. It was difficult to hold the glasses steady enough now to make out the figures on deck; Warriner must be still running the engine at nearly full throttle, to be that far away. Rae was still there, but in another few minutes he wouldn’t be able to see her at all. But if Warriner let go the wheel long enough to put her over, Saracen would swing around; that he’d be able to see.

“No change. Still 240,” the woman said.

“Right—” Minutes dragged by. He lost all track of time. His arms ached, trying to hold the glasses still. The sun beat down on his head, and he could feel sweat run in little rivulets across his face. He could no longer see Saracen’s deck at all, but her course continued straight on toward the southwest without a bobble. She must be still there…

“Still 240.”

It was hopeless now; he might as well admit it. Even if he knew exactly where it happened, the odds were astronomical against finding her in time at that distance. It would take the dinghy three-quarters of an hour to get there, and even the slightest deviation from the course would increase the area by square miles of rolling ocean, all of it exactly alike.

“That’ll do for the moment,” he called out to the woman. “Your auxiliary’s under water? I mean, it won’t run at all?”

“No,” she said. “It’s completely submerged. There’s no fuel, anyway; we used it all.”

He swung the glasses, searching for signs of wind. It would take a half-gale, he thought, to move this cistern through the water, even if they could keep it afloat. As far as he could see in every direction, the surface was as slick as oil. Saracen was hull down, fading over the rim of the horizon. Swept by fear for Rae and black rage at his own helplessness, he wanted to curse and slam the binoculars through the doghouse roof. Instead, he leaped down on deck and turned to the man, who was in the cockpit beside the woman. “How long have you been pumping?”

“It’s been getting a little worse every day for the past two weeks,” the other replied.

“And you haven’t been able to hold it at all, or locate the leaks?”

“I think all her seams are opening up. We could keep up with it at first by pumping two or three hours a day. After a while it took six. And for the past thirty-six hours there’s been somebody on the pump every minute—that is, till around sunup this morning, when he slugged me and locked us in there. No warning at all—the crazy bastard just blew his gasket and tried to kill us—”

Ingram cut him off. “We haven’t got time for the story of your life. How bad’s that cut on your head?”

The other shrugged. “I’ll live. Long enough to drown, anyway.”

“Better have it looked after.” Ingram addressed the woman. “Take him below and clean it and put Mercurochrome or something on it. If it needs stitches, cut the hair away, and call me—I mean, if you’ve got sutures and a needle. When you come back, bring up two buckets and a couple of pieces of line eight or ten feet long.”

“What for?” the man asked.

Ingram turned toward him. “That’s twice you’ve asked me that when I told you to do something. Don’t do it again.”

The other’s grin hardened. “So don’t throw your weight so hard, sport; you might throw it overboard. You may be Captain Bligh on your own boat—”

Ingram walked back to the break of the raised deck and stood looking down at him. “You finished?”

“For the moment. Why?”

“I’m going to tell you, if you’re sure you’ve said all you’ve got to say. You mentioned my boat.” He gestured bleakly toward the southwest. “There it goes. My wife’s on it, with a maniac, unless he’s already killed her. I don’t know what he is to you, and I don’t care, but he came off this boat, if you follow me. So let’s understand each other, once and for all; we’re going after him in this tub if we have to walk and carry it on our backs, and it’s going to stay afloat if you have to drink the water out of it with a straw. I haven’t got time to kiss you or draw you a diagram every time I tell you to do something, so don’t ask me any questions. And I’m pretty close to the edge, so don’t bump me. That clear now?”

There was no fear in the other’s eyes and no bluster, only that hard-bitten humor. “Sounds fair enough, sport, if you know what you’re doing. But be sure you do; I’m allergic to stupid orders.”

“Right,” Ingram said. “How about the radio?”

“Kaput.”

“The receiver too?”

“Yeah. Whole thing was powered by the main batteries.”

“Why didn’t you bring the batteries up here somewhere before the water covered them? That occur to you?”

“They were already discharged. No more gas for the generator.”

No power, no radio, no lights, Ingram thought bitterly. “All right. Go fix your head. And don’t be gone all day.”

They went below. He turned to the pump, which was located against the after side of the doghouse. It had a stirrup handle which was normally covered by a plate flush with the surface of the deck when stowed, but the plate was off now, the handle extending upward. Warriner was up here alone, pumping, when he sighted us, he thought. But instead of calling the others, he slugged the man and locked them in the cabin. Why? He muttered savagely and grabbed the handle; there was no time to waste wondering about the motivations of a psychopath. It was a good pump that could lift a lot of water, and there was no indication of its being clogged. He could hear the water going overboard in a solid-sounding stream as his back bent and straightened.

He started to think of Rae and then tried furiously to make his mind go blank. He’d go crazy. He stepped up the tempo of his pumping. Where the hell were those two? Were they going to take the rest of the summer? Then he realized they hadn’t been gone five minutes. They came back up, carrying two ten-quart buckets, one of them apparently the gurry-bucket from the galley. The man was carrying a length of small line. The blood was washed from his face, and he was wearing a Mexican straw hat with an untrimmed and unbound brim, to protect his head from the sun. “No hemstitching necessary,” he said.

“Okay. Take the pump a minute,” Ingram directed.

“Jawohl, mein Führer.” He grabbed the handle as Ingram let go, and began throwing a hard, steady stream of water over the side. Ingram glanced at him as he stepped back to the cockpit. Clown? Hard case? Idiot? What difference did it make? The azimuth ring was still on the compass. When Orpheus rose to a swell he got a snap bearing of the tiny feather-tip of white that was all that remained now of Saracen’s mainsail. It was 242 degrees. Apparently Warriner was still holding the same course. What did that mean? Anything, or nothing, he thought. Dealing with a deranged mind—what was the use even trying to guess?

The ventilating hatch above the after cabin was closed and secured with a steel pin. He slid the pin out and threw the cover all the way back on deck. The opening was on the centerline, directly above the space between the two bunks below. The other two watched, the man continuing to pump, while he grabbed up the line, cut off a piece about eight feet long, and made one end fast to one of the buckets. He dropped it through the opening, gave a flip of the line to upend it as it landed in the water swirling back and forth across the cabin sole, and hauled it up again hand over hand. He pivoted and threw the water over the side. It was going to work, but it was awkward because of the main boom, which was directly over the opening. He freed the end of it from its notch in the center of the gallows frame, shoved it out to the end, and lashed it. It was all right now. He could stand right over the hatch with his legs on opposite sides. He dropped the bucket again, filled it, and flung the water overboard.

“Okay, let your wife take the pump,” he said to the man. “That’s a little easier. You bail here.”

The man made a burlesque bow to the woman, with a flourish toward the pump. “Pamela, little helpmeet—”

“Shut up,” she said. She began pumping. There was something puzzling about the exchange. Ingram didn’t know what it was—or care.

He handed the man the bucket. “You know how to dip water at the end of a fine?”

“Well, I once poured some out of a boot. Not that I like to brag—”

“Have at it,” Ingram said.

The bucket landed on its side, shipped a pint of water, came upright, and floated. After yanking the line back and forth a half-dozen times, the man succeeded finally in sinking it. He hauled the water up.

“I meant without taking all day,” Ingram said. “Look.” He demonstrated, flipping the bucket so it landed in a dipping position and came up full all in one motion. “I want five or six buckets a minute out of there.”

“Think it’ll do any good?”

“I don’t know,” Ingram replied curtly. “But you haven’t been able to keep up with it with the pump alone. If we don’t gain on it this way, put on your swim trunks. The nearest land’s over that way, twelve hundred miles.”

“Geez, don’t scare me like that. For a minute I thought you said twelve thousand.”

Ingram turned away without reply and gathered up the other bucket and the rest of the line. Between the forward side of the doghouse and the foot of the mainmast was another hatch, secured with dogs. He kicked the dogs loose with his feet and opened it. It was over the centerline of the main cabin, and in the dim light below he could see the debris-laden water pouring mournfully back and forth as Orpheus rolled. He made the line fast to the bucket and dropped it. He hauled it up, full, and threw the water overboard. This near the mainmast, the boom was in his way, and he had to crouch to avoid it. It was uncomfortable, and after a while it would be back-breaking.

Drop … haul … turn … throw … He counted. It was nine seconds. Call it a conservative six buckets a minute—ten a minute between them. They were ten-quart buckets, twenty pounds of water. Six tons of water an hour, with maybe half that much more from the pump. They’d soon know how fast it was coming in; if they didn’t lower it this way, and damned fast, they were done for. They couldn’t keep up this pace for very long, all three of them working at once. Somebody had to sleep, and if they ever got a breeze one had to be at the wheel.

There was something else that had to be done, too, within the next few minutes. He straightened, looking down toward the southwest. There was no trace now of Saracen; she was gone over the horizon. He reached up and unshackled the halyard from the head of the mainsail and made a sling from what was left of the line they’d brought up, leaving a free end about four feet long. He shackled the sling to the end of the halyard, retrieved the binoculars, and slung them about his neck.

I’ll need both of you for a few minutes,” he called out to the man. They came forward. “Think you can hoist me to the top of the mast?”

“Sure.” The other looked up at the spar swinging its dizzy arc across the sky. “Better you than me.”

“Why not me?” the woman asked. “I’m the lightest.”

Ingram shook his head. “It’s not easy. If you lost the mast it’d beat you to jelly before we could get you down.”

He didn’t like the prospect himself, with Orpheus rolling her rails under and two people he didn’t know on the other end of the line, but there was no help for it. He loosed the halyard fall from the pin on the forward side of the mast. “Keep a turn around the pin,” he said. “And take it slow. When I get up to the spreaders I’ll tell you when to stop and when to heave.”

He climbed atop the boom, stepped into the sling, took a turn around the mast with the free end of the line, and made it fast to the shackle. “Okay. Hoist away.” The halyard came taut, with his weight suspended in the sling, and he began to move upward in short jerks, two or three feet at a time, with his legs locked around it while he pulled upward with his arms. The first twenty feet were not too bad, but as he continued to mount his arc increased, both in distance and in velocity, with the resultant snap at the end more abrupt and punishing. He reached the spreaders, the horizontal members extending out at right angles to the mast. This was the dangerous part. He had to cast off his safety belt momentarily in order to pass it around the mast above them.

“Hold it a minute,” he called out. With both legs and one arm locked around the mast, he worked at the knot with his free hand. It came loose. If he lost his grip now he’d swing out and then back against the mast with enough force to break his skull. The mast swung down to starboard, snapped abruptly at the end, and came back. His arms and legs were slick with sweat, almost frictionless against the varnished surface. He changed arms, caught the dangling piece of line with his right hand, passed it up over the spreader and around the mast. Gripping the mast with his right arm again, he made the end of the line fast once more to the shackle with his left hand, working solely by feel.

“Up easy,” he called out. “Slow. About two feet.”

He came up, got one leg across the spreader, and then the other. “Okay, hoist away.” He went on up. Three feet from the masthead light and the blocks at the top of the mast, he called out, “That’ll do. Make it fast.” He hoped they knew how.

This was no place for a queasy stomach, he thought. It was like riding a bucking horse making forty feet at a bound. While he was groping for the binoculars he looked down at the deck sixty feet below. Most of the time he was out over the water; he crossed the deck only through the vertical sector of his swing from one side to the other. The centrifugal force at the end of the roll when the mast stopped abruptly and started back felt as if it were going to tear him loose and hurl him outward like a projectile from a catapult.

He brought the binoculars up with both arms wrapped about the mast, and swept them along the line of the horizon off to port. At first he was afraid he’d waited too long. Then his pulse leaped. There she was, a minute sliver of white poised just over the rim of the world.

“If you’re made fast down there,” he called out, “one of you give me the heading.”

“We can’t see her from down here,” the man yelled back.

“No. I mean our heading. How are we lying?”

The woman went aft and peered into the binnacle. “Two-nine-oh,” she shouted up at him.

He looked down at the deck, estimating the angle on the bow. Call it four points, he thought. Forty-five from two-ninety left two-forty-five. Saracen’s bearing had remained practically unchanged from the first. Warriner was apparently headed for the Marquesas.

If he had thought to fool them by changing course after he was over the horizon, the chances were he would have already done it. Orpheus, with her bare masts, had long since dropped from sight from over there, and he’d probably assume he was equally invisible. Or would he? Just because he was unbalanced or mentally sick didn’t mean he had to be stupid. Witness that story he’d made up about the deaths from botulism.

He put the glasses back to his eyes. The little point of white thinned and disappeared, then came up again. Was she still on there? What was happening now, or had happened already? He closed his eyes for an instant and prayed. When he opened them and looked through the glasses again, Saracen was gone over the curvature of the earth. He looked around at the slickly heaving, empty miles of the equatorial Pacific shimmering under the sun without even the suspicion of a breeze and felt sick. Automatically he glanced at his watch to note the time. It was 9:50.

5

Far to the northward a squall flickered and rumbled along the horizon, but here they appeared to hang suspended in a vacuum while the sun beat down and the oily groundswell rolled endlessly up from the south. The air was like warm damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated, unmoving.

Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of insects crawling across the skin. It ran down into his already sodden and clinging shorts and dripped into his sneakers. His back ached from crouching under the boom.

Dip, lift, throw—it went on without stop. The man was working silently above the after cabin, throwing water with a machine-like regularity now that matched his own, and he could hear the steady stream from the pump. It had been an hour and ten minutes since he’d come down from the mast. They’d thrown out nine to ten tons of water, at least, and still the buckets came up full. He’d made no attempt to get a sounding before they started; it was unnecessary. The problem was too elementary to need any measurements—either they got the water out of those cabins this way within a few hours or they were done. If it continued to rise, or even if it remained at the same level, they had no chance, because they obviously couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. And whenever they stopped to sleep or collapsed from exhaustion, she’d go down.

He was dehydrated, and the ropy saliva inside his mouth tasted like brass. He wondered if they had fresh water that wasn’t contaminated, and then remembered Warriner hadn’t been suffering from thirst. Straightening, he looked aft. The woman was tiring; it was evident in the strained and set expression of her face. And the man, though there’d been no word of complaint, was in pain from the blow on his head. It showed in his eyes, below the level of that hard-boiled and half-contemptuous amusement with which he seemed to regard everything that happened.

He walked aft and took the pump handle. “Better take five,” he said. “And get a drink. It’s not going to help things if you keel over.” He turned to the man. “You too.”

“I’ll bring some water,” she said and went below. Ingram bent to the pump. In a moment she came back, carrying a saucepan full of water and a cup and a pack of cigarettes. She set the water on top of the doghouse, lit one of the cigarettes, and sat down on deck with her feet on the steps of the doghouse hatch. There was no protection anywhere on deck from the brutal weight of the sun, and the trapped air below would be stifling. The man took a drink and sat down on deck with his legs dangling in the hatch where he’d been working. After he’d had a cup of the water himself, Ingram went on pumping, driven by the compulsion to hurry, to do something, anything, and by fear of his thoughts if he stopped.

“How about one of your cigarettes, honey?” the man asked.

The woman tossed them toward him silently, without even looking at him. He lit one and asked Ingram, “How much gas you figure you had aboard?”

Ingram continued to pump. “Maybe a hundred and fifty miles at normal cruising speed. Wide open, the way he left here, not much more than half of that—if he doesn’t burn the engine up first.”

“So call it a round hundred,” the man said. “It’s been a long time since I diddled around with the pi-r-square jazz, but won’t that work out to a good-sized piece of ocean?”

“Yeah,” Ingram replied. “With nothing else to go on, about thirty thousand square miles.”

“I had a hunch you couldn’t carry it around in a cup. And that’s not to mention the fact he’s not going to stop just because he runs out of gas. We get a breeze, he’ll probably get one too. The wind blows on the nutty as well as the beautiful and the pure in heart. Shakespeare. Or was it Salmon P. Chase?”

“I said with nothing else to go on,” Ingram pointed out curtly. “We know which way he left here, and it’s almost a cinch he’s headed for the Marquesas. That’s the reason I went up the mast, to see if he’d changed course. He hasn’t. And if we ever hope to make land, the Marquesas are the best chance we’ve got. So why not follow him? And see if we can keep this thing afloat? But don’t let me influence you, if you’ve got a better suggestion.”

The other shrugged. “Keep your hair on. I was just trying to estimate the chances. Not good, huh?”

“No,” Ingram said. He was about to mention that they had one advantage in that Warriner would have to sleep sometime, but bit it back. It presupposed his being alone on Saracen.

The man glanced up as if he’d read his thoughts. “There were just the two of you?”

Ingram nodded.

“Naturally, you never know what a creep’ll do, but she might have a chance. He likes a woman around to cry on.”

Ingram wanted desperately to reach for this ray of hope, but he’d never been good at self-deception. “And go into port somewhere with a witness?”

“Golden Boy’s not so hot at the long-range view. He might not think about that for days, especially with a nice bosom to throw himself on with his Kleenex.”

“Will you, for Christ’s sake, shut up?” the woman asked wearily.

Ingram glanced at her with curiosity, aware this was the first time he’d actually seen her since that first glance in the cabin, when his only impression had been that she was scared to death and appeared to be naked. Since he’d come back aboard he’d paid no attention to either of them except as to their potential value as tools or pieces of equipment in the matter of keeping this sodden tub afloat and following Saracen in it. She was probably in her late thirties, or perhaps even forty, but a strikingly handsome woman in spite of the disarray of her hair and the exhausted and sweat-streaked face. The hair itself was raven black except for a streak of gray, and the eyes were large and brown, but with more imperiousness than gentleness in them. She wore brief white shorts and a white halter which could have been a soiled gray and still appeared like snow against the tan of her body. Under other circumstances he might have noted that she had superb legs, but at the moment he was only wondering if she’d rested long enough to start pumping again. That, and what the hostility was between the two of them. Probably Warriner, he thought, remembering the way Rae had defended him. He seemed to have some fatal fascination for women older than himself. Rae was thirty-five. Then, for the first time, he remembered that presumably there’d been four people on here.

“What happened to Mrs. Warriner?” he asked.

The man grinned. “After marrying Hughie-boy, what could happen to anybody? It already has.”

The woman exhaled smoke and looked musingly at Ingram. “I’d like to correct the impression you seem to have that I’m married to this specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus. I’m Mrs. Warriner.”

He said nothing, but his surprise must have showed on his face, for she smiled a trifle wearily and said, “Yes, I am, aren’t I?”

“Momma likes ‘em young and mixed up,” the man said, and Ingram decided today probably wasn’t the first time he’d been slugged by somebody. Even people otherwise in full command of their faculties must have found the urge too much to resist.

He introduced himself and added, “We were bound from Florida to Papeete.”

“I’m very glad to know you, Mr. Ingram,” she said. “But sorry about the circumstances. This fringe-area human being is Mr. Bellew. If you’ve been wondering why my husband cracked up, perhaps the mystery is clearing. Just multiply your brief acquaintance by twenty-six days.”

But there was still the fourth one. “And Mrs. Bellew?”

Bellew turned toward Mrs. Warriner, his eyes bright. “Why don’t you tell him, honey? Nobody ever likes my version.”

“Estelle drowned,” she said. “Or was killed by a shark—”

“Or she was hit by a hockey puck, or some drunk in a sports car.” Bellew took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it between his knees into the water in the cabin. “Hughie-boy killed her.”

“That’s a lie!” Mrs. Warriner’s voice was under control, but Ingram could see the fury in her eyes.

“Oh, not deliberately, perish the thought.” Bellew looked at Ingram and made a deprecating gesture with his hands. “Hughie-dear wouldn’t even dream of killing anybody—unless she happened to be in the way when he was trying to save his precious neck. Naturally, you can’t have that sort of thing. What kind of world would it be without Hughie?”

“You were the one, if anybody was, you blind fool!” Mrs. Warriner started to get up, her self-control beginning to slip. “If you’d watched what you were doing—”

“Break it up!” Ingram’s command cut through the scene with a parade-ground bark that halted her. “Both of you! You can fight some other time, if there is one. Get back to work.”

With a venomous glance at Bellew, Mrs. Warriner took the pump. The other stood up and reached for the bucket. “And then Hughie hit this nasty old shark right on the nose, and he says you take that, you nasty old shark you. My wife can whip your wife.”

Mrs. Warriner started to turn, her face pale. Ingram caught her arm and wheeled her back to the pump. At the same time he barked at Bellew, “Shut up and start throwing water!”

Bellew looked at him with lazy insolence for a moment, as though on the point of refusing out of mere curiosity as to what would happen. Then he shrugged and dropped the bucket through the hatch. “You might have a point there, sport. Drowning makes an awful mess of my hair.”

Ingram returned to the hatch forward of the deckhouse, dropped the bucket, and began furiously throwing water overboard, conscious of the wasted minutes. What kind of madhouse was this? With the boat sinking under their feet, you had to tear them from each other’s throats and drive them to make them try to save themselves. Well, they’d pump, God damn them; they’d pump till they were standing on their tongues.

What had happened to the fourth one, Estelle Bellew? At the moment he didn’t care, but it was a way to keep from thinking of Rae. Didn’t they even know? How could one call it an accident and the other say Warriner had killed her? Warriner was fleeing from something, there was no doubt, from some terror that had pushed him over the edge into madness. Or was he only running from Bellew? If you were weak and unstable to begin with, twenty-six days of Bellew’s sadistic bullying and amused contempt would drive anybody around the bend. But why in the name of God had they ever started out together in the first place, to sail across the Pacific, four of them in an unsound boat? Well, they must have been friends then, friends and too lacking in experience to know what being cooped up on a small boat for weeks at a time could do to clashing personalities.

But it was futile. His thoughts always came back to the question from which there was no escape. What would Warriner do? But if he were insane, how could you even guess? Where did you start? Would he kill her or throw her overboard because she was a witness to the fact he’d gone off and left three people to drown on a sinking boat? Or worse, did he believe he’d killed Bellew? Presumably, he’d hit him from behind, and Bellew had fallen into the water, probably unconscious. Therefore Warriner might be convinced he was guilty of murder—in addition to whatever had happened to Estelle Bellew—and obviously there could be no turning back and no surviving witnesses. But this was assuming a mind at least partially capable of rational thought, of reasoning from cause to effect, from crime to punishment and how to escape it. Well, hadn’t he already shown he was capable of that? He’d made up that very clever and very plausible story about the deaths from botulism just to keep him, Ingram, from going aboard Orpheus and discovering what he’d done. The answer probably was that there wasn’t any answer, nothing ever clear-cut and definite; even the hopelessly psychotic must have rational intervals. Maybe at times he knew what he was doing, while at others he was completely cut off from reality.

Then what? Rae was no match for him physically; he was a powerfully built man in his early twenties. You could forget that. And there was no weapon— He stopped. The shotgun. It was a twelve-gauge double he’d brought along for hunting in Australia and New Zealand. But it was taken down, the barrels and stock wrapped separately in oiled sheepskin and stowed in a drawer where it could be sealed by customs in ports where it wasn’t permitted. She knew nothing about guns; could she even assemble and load it? No, that wasn’t the question. Could she use it? Could she deliberately shoot a man with it? And if she did, what would it do to her afterward? There was nothing pretty about the results of a shotgun blast at close range; she’d have nightmares the rest of her life and wake up screaming— Stop thinking about things you have no control over, he told himself. That’s out of your hands; just throw water and keep throwing it. It can’t be running in as fast as we’re dumping it out now; something’s got to give.

It was less than thirty minutes later that two things happened almost at once. The first was a definite indication that they were gaining on the water: as it rushed from side to side with Orpheus’s rolling, the bucket would sometimes strike bottom and come up less than full. Maybe less than a foot deep in the cabins now, he thought, if she were on an even keel; they’d thrown out probably that much in an hour and a half of furious pumping and bailing. The other thing was a breeze.

He’d been so intent on bailing, his first awareness of it was the cool feel on his face. He looked up. It was straight out of the west, and as far as he could see the surface of the sea was wrinkled and dark. “Wind,” Mrs. Warriner called out at the same moment.

“Right,” he said. “Just keep pumping; you can take the wheel in a minute.” He dropped the bucket and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail, working feverishly and praying the wind would last. He freed the end of the boom, took a strain on it with the topping lift, and reshackled the halyard to the head of the sail. He hoisted it, tightened it down with the winch, and started on the double for the jib. Then he turned and called back to the other two, “Have you got a genoa aboard?” No doubt he’d regret it by the time he’d manhandled it from one side to the other a dozen times or so in these fluky airs, but every foot of distance was precious. A genoa would add almost the equivalent of another mainsail to her, and it was going to take all the canvas they could get on her to move this hulk in anything short of a gale.

It was Mrs. Warriner who replied, “Yes, there’s a genoa, and also a big nylon spinnaker. The sail locker’s forward. Do you want me to show you?”

“No. I’ll get it.” There was a hatchway to the forward cabin.

He opened it and hurried down the ladder. The light was dim below deck, the air stifling and saturated with moisture, and water washed back and forth around his legs. In back of the ladder was a doorway opening into the locker in the bows of the boat. The sailbags were stowed in a bin on the port side, some six or eight of them altogether. He began muscling them out and looking at the markings on the sides. There were spare mainsails and mizzens, a couple of jibs, a storm trysail, a spinnaker, and the genoa jib. He looked at this young fortune in sails and wished they’d bought a hull to go with them. He beefed the genoa back up the ladder, dumped it in the bow, and began unhanking the smaller jib. The breeze was still cool against his sweaty face, and Orpheus had begun to come ponderously up into the wind, still rolling heavily. He got the genoa snapped onto the stay, shackled the halyard to its head, and hoisted it. He didn’t know where the sheet was, but grabbed up one of the lines littering the deck, made it fast to the clew, led it out around the port shrouds, through the block on the port side of the deck aft of midships, and back to the winch near the cockpit. Orpheus swung off to starboard. The mainsail filled, with the genoa aback and blown in against the shrouds. She began to move slowly ahead. When she had steerageway, he brought the wheel hard over; she came slowly up into the wind and fell off on the starboard tack with both the mainsail and genoa full and drawing. He checked the compass. They were heading 220. He came right a little and re-trimmed the sheets, but 225 was the best they could do. It wasn’t too far from the course they wanted.

He called out to Mrs. Warriner, “You take the wheel now. Bellew can relieve you there at the pump.”

She came aft. Bellew moved to the pump, for once without comment. Ingram broke out the mizzen and hoisted it. The breeze had continued to freshen, and now tiny whitecaps were winking on the broad undulations of the swell. During all this burst of furious activity and the excitement of getting under way, the fear had been pushed to the back of his mind, but now as he looked over the side it all came back with a rush, along with a galling and futile anger. Were they moving at all? With the same breeze Saracen would have been footing along at four or five knots, but this sodden coffin had little more than steerageway.

“Let me take her again for a minute,” he said to Mrs. Warriner. Maybe they were pinching her, trying to point higher into the wind than she would sail. She relinquished the wheel. He came left ten degrees, started the sheets, retrimmed them, tried her farther off the wind, and came back. It was no use. She had no feel of life to her anywhere, no desire to move; she answered the helm with the leaden apathy of a dying animal that no longer wanted anything but rest.

He hadn’t expected much, but this was even worse. If you could manufacture your own wind to order, by direction and force, you couldn’t make fifty miles a day. He came back to the original course, turned the wheel over to Mrs. Warriner, stepped over to the rail, and looked down. Below the water-line streamers of green hair wove backward with their passage. With ten to twenty tons of water inside her and that pasture on the bottom, he thought, how could you expect anything to move her? “When was the last time she was hauled out?” he asked Mrs. Warriner.

“About eight months ago,” she replied. “When we bought her.”

Well, that figured; it matched everything else about this expedition. He stepped down into the doghouse and dug a chart of the South Pacific out of the litter on the deck. Even if they weren’t going anywhere, they had to have a position, a point of departure. Their last position should be in the logbook, but he didn’t trust their navigation. He’d had a good fix from three star sights just at dusk last night; from that, by dead reckoning, they’d made twenty-five miles along a course of 235 degrees. That should be Saracen’s position at dawn when he’d sighted Orpheus. She was—call it five miles away, on a bearing of 315. That would put her here.

He penciled a cross on the chart: 4.20 South latitude, 123.30 West longitude. The Marquesas were roughly twelve hundred miles to the west southwest, the Galapagos over two thousand miles behind them, and elsewhere nothing but thousands of miles of empty ocean. The chances of their being sighted by a ship were to all practical purposes nonexistent.

And as for ever catching up with Saracen, even if they could find her … Face it, he thought. She was already far over the horizon, making six knots under power. And when her fuel ran out, she could still outsail this waterlogged hulk with nothing but her mizzen and somebody’s shirt.

“The wind’s heading us,” Mrs. Warriner called out from the cockpit. He went back on deck. The breeze had veered around to the southwest, and she had bare steerageway on a course that was now a little east of south.

“We’ll come about,” he said. He cast off the genoa sheet, carried the sail forward around the stay and outside the starboard shrouds, and trimmed the sheet on the port tack. They were steering 275 now, which was 35 degrees to the west of the course they wanted. But in a few minutes the wind went further around to the southward and they were able to come down to 245. Then it died out momentarily and sprang up again out of the northwest. He carried the genoa around again. Ten minutes later the wind began to soften once more, and then died with complete finality. Orpheus slogged forward a few feet, came to rest, and began to roll heavily in the trough. He looked around the horizon. In every direction the surface of the ocean had the slick, hot glare of polished steel.

They’d made less than a mile. It was 12:10 p.m.

* * *

Her face hurt. It was lying on something hard that went up and down and wove back and forth the way the floor had the only time in her life she’d ever been drunk, and there was that same sick feeling in her stomach. Somewhere a long way off there was an engine sort of noise that seemed to have been going on forever, and just audible above it, or through it, a voice was singing. It was an old, very sentimental popular song, one she hadn’t heard for years, but it was still familiar. What was it? Oh. “Charmaine.” That was it. She rolled over. Some powerful light glared beyond her closed eyelids, and she grasped that it was sunlight. She opened them and squinted with pain. Just beyond her was a pair of wide and very sun-tanned shoulders surmounted by a gold-thatched head. At the same moment the head turned, still singing, and Hughie Warriner regarded her with concern, which gave way to evident relief. He smiled. It was a charming and affectionate smile, and there was something almost chiding about it. She tried to scream, or to move, but could do neither.

The song stopped. “See, you’re all right,” he said. “Now aren’t you sorry you made me do it?”

6

John wasn’t here. The paralysis of shock snapped then, and she screamed. “Where are we? Where are you going? We’ve got to go back!”

Warriner gave no indication he’d even heard her. She tried to sit up and was assailed by vertigo. The ocean tilted while nausea ballooned inside her, and she collapsed, fighting to keep from being sick. She closed her eyes for an instant to stop the whirling, and when she opened them Warriner had turned forward again to look into the compass. He was sitting in the helmsman’s seat in the back of the cockpit, just beyond her legs. He reached a hand around and caught her left ankle, not tightly or roughly, but merely as though to soothe her or to reassure himself she hadn’t disappeared.

She cringed and tried to scuttle backward, but there was nowhere to go; behind her was only the sea. She was cut off; she couldn’t reach the wheel or the ignition switch, or even the rest of the boat, without getting past him. There was nothing to hit him with, even if she had the strength.

The hand slid down her ankle and was caressing her bare foot. He turned around again. “You have such beautiful feet,” he said. “And women so seldom do. I mean, they do to start with, but they ruin them. Especially European women.”

She could only stare in horror.

“In fact, I’ve often wondered if Gauguin didn’t run away to Polynesia simply because he was revolted by the feet of European models.” His eyes sought hers in a glance that was amused and intimate, as though they shared some secret joke. “Of course it’s silly. It’s just something you say to clods at cocktail parties.”

Dear God, how did you get through to him? “Listen!” She made it to a sitting position this time, lurched once as Saracen rolled, and caught herself with a hand on the lifeline. “Please! We’ve got to go back! Don’t you understand? Turn around. Turn. Like this.” She made a lateral motion with her free hand, as though trying to explain the mechanics of wheel-turning to an idiot or to someone who spoke another language. She realized immediately this was wrong, but was too frantic to know how to correct it. She went on, the words tumbling over each other in her haste. “Let me! Let me take it!”

“No.” The smile disappeared. He gave a petulant little shrug, as though she had disappointed him, and faced forward to stare into the binnacle again.

She turned and looked wildly astern. How far had they come? At first she couldn’t even see the other boat and felt herself begin to give way to panic. Then she made it out, almost hull down on the horizon directly behind them. There was no chance at all of seeing the dinghy at that distance, and she didn’t know what had become of John. Except that he wasn’t here, and they were already nearly three miles away and going farther with every minute. She was the only chance he had. She turned back and caught Warriner’s shoulder. “Go back! We’ve got to go back!”

He brushed her hand off. “Please, Mrs. Ingram, do you have to shout? You’re being unreasonable again.”

“Un—un—Oh, God!” She tried to calm herself; if she went to pieces she’d never get through to him. “Unreasonable? Can’t you understand? My husband’s back there. We can’t go off and leave him. He’ll drown.”

Warriner dismissed the whole subject of Ingram with an abstracted wave of the hand. “He won’t drown.”

“But the boat’s sinking—”

“It probably won’t. Anyway, he wanted to go aboard there, didn’t he? It’s his own fault.” He turned and looked at her, as though puzzled by her refusal to grasp so obvious a fact. Then he went on, as if talking to himself. “My trouble has always been that I trust people too much. I don’t see their real motives until too late…”

It was hopeless, she realized then. Communication was impossible. Then what was left? Try to take the wheel away from him? Even in her desperation she realized the futility of that. And if she provoked him to violence again, this time he might kill her or throw her overboard. It wasn’t fear of being hurt or even killed that made her rule that out, or reserve it as a final gamble when everything else had failed, but merely the simple, monolithic fact that her staying on here and staying alive represented the only chance they had. She had to try every other possibility first. But what? Then the answer occurred to her: she couldn’t make him turn back, but at least she could stop his going any farther. It was still dead calm, and there was a good chance it would remain that way for hours, or even the rest of the day; if she could disable the engine, John might be able to reach them in the dinghy. But access to it was below; she had to get down into the cabin. Would he let her?

She pushed herself to her knees, grasping the lifeline, and made a tentative move to go past him along the deck on the starboard side of the cockpit. “I—I feel sick at my stomach,” she said. “I’ve got to go to the head.”

He gestured toward the rail. “Why not there?”

“I don’t like being sick in public.”

“No, of course not,” he said sympathetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that.”

She wasn’t conscious of the utter madness of this conversation until she was halfway down the ladder, and wondered if she was losing contact with reality herself. All the landmarks and reference points of rational existence had been so suddenly jolted out of position, she couldn’t orient herself. It was as though they were threatened with destruction by the blind and impersonal trajectories of some hitherto placid machine that had run amok through a short circuit in its wiring. Warriner perhaps didn’t intend any harm to either of them; they just happened to be in his path. Nor was he threatening her with violence or placing her under any restraint; she was merely powerless to do anything about him.

He couldn’t see down into the cabin from where he was, in the aft end of the cockpit; once she was down the ladder she was out of sight. The engine was installed under the cockpit, and access to the compartment was through a removable panel in the after bulkhead of the cabin. She turned and was on the point of lifting the panel out when it occurred to her she had no idea at all what she was actually going to do. Disabling the engine had a fine sound to it—but just how did she disable it, and what was she going to do afterward?

The minute it stopped he would come hurrying down the ladder to find out what had happened. And even if she’d succeeded in sabotaging it beyond immediate repair it might be hours before John got here. It would be some time before he was sure Saracen had stopped, and it would take at least an hour to row a dinghy this far. She had to have some line of retreat, a place to barricade herself where Warriner couldn’t reach her. The companion hatch itself couldn’t be fastened from inside. The head? No, the door was too light. Warriner could smash the panel out of it with one kick. The forward cabin, that was the answer. The door was heavier and had a bolt inside. Also there were the cases of stores and the heavy sailbags to barricade it with.

Just hurry, she thought. She lifted the panel out and was assailed by sudden fear as the noise level, already high, increased. Would he notice it? She looked fearfully up at the hatch, expecting to see it darken. Nothing happened. Where he was sitting was almost above it; probably the difference in noise level was too small to be apparent up there. The compartment was dark, but there was a light switch just inside the entrance. She flicked it on and leaned in.

The engine had been running at nearly full throttle for a half-hour, and in addition to its ear-shattering racket the compartment was filled with the fumes of hot paint and burning oil. She felt nausea push up into her throat again. The engine itself was in the center of the small space, with the starting and lighting batteries on her right and a metal locker containing spare parts and tools on her left.

She studied it, searching for a vulnerable spot to attack. Though she had once been a sports-car enthusiast and had for a short period in her life owned an agency for one of the European cars, she knew little more about gasoline engines than does the average woman. She was aware, however, that they could be stopped by shutting off either the gasoline supply or the spark that exploded it. There was a valve in the small copper line coming from the fuel tank to the connection on the engine, but closing that would solve nothing. She could take a hammer from the toolbox and smash the line itself, but that would let the fuel drain into the bilges and convert the boat into a potential bomb. Then how about pulling loose a bunch of wires? That was better, but still not perfect. Warriner could replace them in less than an hour. Then her glance fell on the distributor. There was the answer. Smash that, and the power plant was permanently out of commission.

Then she had a better idea. Why not just remove the cap, where the wires came out? She could take it into the cabin with her; the engine couldn’t run without it, and when John got aboard he could replace it and they’d still have the engine intact. She’d watched him take it off to clean the contacts and was certain she knew how to do it. All it required was pulling out those five wires and releasing the two spring clips on the sides, and then it lifted right off. But even that would take longer than the single hammer-blow it would require to smash it, and if he made it down here before she was locked in he would simply replace it after he’d taken it away from her. She paused, undecided, and was about to abandon the idea when another occurred to her.

How many times had John cautioned her never—no matter how short of space she was around the galley—to set anything on the ladder? To the person descending, it was invisible until he’d stepped on it and fallen. She whirled and reached into the stowage racks above the sink and brought out three saucepans. She set them in a row on the next-to-bottom step; under way, Saracen wasn’t rolling heavily enough to throw them off within the next few minutes, which was all the time she needed.

She bent over and crawled into the compartment. With the metal locker pushing against her back and the bottom of the cockpit crowding her above, it was difficult to balance herself against the corkscrew motion of the boat’s stern. Here right up against the engine the racket was deafening, and she could feel herself growing sick again from the fumes. She turned slightly, so as to be headed outward. Now—

She yanked out the wire in the center of the cap. The roar of the engine cut off abruptly. She began furiously snatching out the other four, the ones to the spark plugs. She had three of them loose and was reaching for the fourth when Saracen rolled down to port and she lost her balance. She fell over on the engine, her left forearm against the hot exhaust manifold. The sudden pain was too much for her already nauseated stomach. All the strength drained out of her and she collapsed, vomiting onto the floorboards beside the engine. Light footsteps sounded in the cockpit pressing against the top of her head.

Maybe even now there wasn’t time to get out. But she had to have the cap; she’d never get another chance. She groped blindly for the last wire and had it in her hand when she was seized by another spasm of sickness. She tore it loose, still vomiting, and clawed at the spring clips on the side. The cap came free. She propelled herself toward the opening, and as her head emerged she saw Warriner’s bare legs hurrying down the ladder, above her and to her right. She was cut off; she’d taken a second too long.

Then his right foot came down on the outer rim of one of the saucepans. It flew from under him and he landed amid a metallic crashing at the foot of the ladder. She was out of the engine compartment now, and if she could get by him before he got to his feet she might make it. As she shot past he threw out an arm and caught her ankle. She pulled free but was spun off balance, and she fell over against the port bunk. He had rolled over and was scrambling to his feet. She bounced off the bunk, somehow still clutching the distributor cap, and flung herself toward the entrance to the forward cabin. She was in. She slammed the door, but before she could throw the bolt he hit it from the other side.

It came inward. She had her shoulder against it, but her feet were slipping along the deck as she was forced back. Without something to brace herself against, the outcome was inevitable. She looked behind her and saw the piled sailbags on the port bunk just beyond her legs. Putting her right foot up against them, she managed to straighten the leg enough to lock her knee. It was impossible to force him back, but the door wasn’t open enough for him to squeeze through. She could hear his feet sliding on the deck outside as he tried to get enough traction to bring his full strength to bear. A minute went by. She could feel herself growing faint, and her knee was beginning to tremble.

She still had the distributor cap in her hand and tried frantically to think of some way to dispose of it. Maybe she could toss it behind something. No. He knew she had had it when she ran in here; he’d find it, no matter what she did with it. But it was made of plastic; maybe if she slammed it down hard enough it would break. She shifted it to her free right hand and threw it with the last of her strength against the planking of the deck. It bounced upward at a slight angle, caromed off the sailbags, passed under her straining and almost horizontal body, and came down, spinning, near the bulkhead, less than a foot from the partially opened door, still intact. If he reached in he could pick it up.

He had never uttered a word. She could hear only his labored breathing and the scuffing of his sneakers against the deck on the other side of the door, and the decreasing sounds of water going past the hull as Saracen slowed and came to rest. There was a quality of horror somehow in this very absence of speech that made her shiver. She couldn’t hold out much longer; her leg was going to buckle any second.

She threw herself suddenly to the left, releasing the door. It flew inward, and he shot past her, losing his balance and falling to the deck between the bunks. She scooped up the distributor cap and ran through the after cabin toward the ladder. If she could only make it into the open before he caught her she could throw it overboard. Her head and shoulders were above the hatch, and she was drawing back her arm to throw it, when she was caught from below. It dribbled out of her hand and into the bottom of the cockpit. She managed to kick free, ran up the last two steps, and leaped into the cockpit after it. She had it in her hand when his weight landed on her from behind and she was slammed down on the port seat of the cockpit with the hand pinned beneath her body.

But he made no effort to reach beneath her and pull it out; his hands were digging at the back and sides of her neck as he tried to close his fingers around her throat. She hunched her shoulders up and pulled her chin down, grinding her face against the cushion. Then his weight was suddenly gone from her shoulders and she was lifted and thrown onto her back. She kicked out with her legs and struck at his face, but his hands were around her throat now and tightening. The contorted face and wild eyes were just above hers, and she closed her own eyes to shut them out.

The struggle was utterly silent except for a faint whining sound he made deep in his throat and the sibilant whisperings of their violence against the plastic cushion. She could no longer breathe, and the sunlight penetrating her closed eyelids began to fade downward through darkening shades of pink toward final blackness. But her hand was free now. Just as consciousness was slipping away she raised it and threw the distributor cap outward. There was no sound of its striking the deck, so it must have gone into the water. Or maybe she was already beyond hearing…

Then, strangely, she was breathing again. The hands were gone from her throat. She opened her eyes. He had stood up and was leaning across her, with his hands on the port life-line, as though he’d forgotten her. She couldn’t see his face. She slid cautiously backward, toward the forward end of the cockpit. He paid no attention. She eased herself upright, poised to leap toward the hatch, and glanced fearfully once more in his direction to see if he had turned. This time she saw his face and understood. She looked outward in the same direction.

It was the distributor cap. It had landed just off the port side, and with Saracen now lying at rest on the surface it was sinking almost straight below them through sunlit water as clear as gin. And as he had the other time at the bottle, he was staring down at it with horror and with some sick but inescapable compulsion as it slipped from side to side and then began a gentle spiral that would end in the ooze and the darkness two miles below. The agony of his face was indescribable. He screamed then and collapsed into the bottom of the cockpit with his face pressed into the seat cushion.

She stared, still poised to leap but frozen to the spot. His head rocked from side to side and he clutched the cockpit coaming with a grip that corded the muscles of his forearms. “No, no, no!” he cried out. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t mean it! It was her fault!” He began to cry then with a ragged sobbing that made his whole body shake.

She was able to move at last. She ran down the ladder on rubbery legs and through the after cabin. After slamming the door between the two, she threw the bolt and began dragging cases of canned stores from under the bunks and piling them in front of it. There were six sailbags. She stacked them against the door also, wedging the last ones against the upright pipes of the bunk frame. She was trembling and drenched with perspiration when she had finished, and collapsed on the bunk, too weak to move. Her face was swollen and painful where he had hit her, and there was an ugly red splotch on the bottom of her left forearm where it had come in contact with the exhaust manifold. She was scared, and she was sick with anxiety for John, but for the moment she was safe. Without an ax to smash the door, Warriner had little chance of breaking in, and there was no ax aboard. And until they got a breeze he couldn’t take Saracen any farther away. All she could do now was wait it out.

Saracen rolled desolately in the trough of the swell. There was no sound from beyond the door except the normal creakings, slidings, and minute collisions of shifting objects always present on a small boat at sea, and Rae might even have been alone. She tried to make some sense of this thing that had happened to them, but ran immediately into the opaque and impenetrable wall of the fact that Warriner was the only clue to any of it, and Warriner was mad. Where did you go from a starting point like that?

John had suspected there was something wrong with him. If only she’d paid more attention and hadn’t waked him up by starting the engine … Well, there was no use crying about that now. But what had John found on the other yacht that had made him burst out of the cabin that way and leap down into the dinghy? Somebody hurt or sick? But in that case why was he coming back alone? Wait, she thought, you’re close. What he found must have been some proof Warriner was lying, unstable, or dangerous, or all three, and he was rushing back because you were alone here with him. But what proof?

Warriner had tried to kill her; maybe he’d already killed somebody else. It was abundantly obvious now he hadn’t been chasing her to recover the distributor cap; the chances were he hadn’t even known she had it. He’d been intent simply on strangling her because she’d somehow stopped the engine. And his horror at watching it sink had nothing to do with its being a part of the engine; he probably hadn’t even recognized what it was. It was the same as with the bottle: he was seeing something else, or somebody.

I didn’t do it! … I didn’t mean it! …

Guilt? Terror? Who knew, or could even guess? But the whole story of the deaths from botulism must have been a lie, so it was possible something else and equally terrible had happened. Maybe he was responsible for it— She tensed. He was coming through the after cabin. She sat up and drew back on the bunk, waiting for the impact as he slammed into the door. Would it hold?

Then she grabbed her temples and fought a collapse into hysteria. He’d knocked—a tentative and discreet rap of the knuckles—and said forlornly, “Mrs. Ingram?”

You’re not mad, are you, Mama? I didn’t know it would hurt the cat. Stop it! she thought. You’re beginning to crack up yourself.

He knocked again. “Mrs. Ingram? Please, I didn’t mean it! You’ve got to believe me! I—I just lost my head for a minute because I thought you were against me too. But you’re not, are you? You couldn’t be. You’re like Estelle. The first minute I saw you, I could feel you talking to me, the way she did. Mrs. Ingram, what’s your first name?”

She could only feel of her throat and go on staring at the door.

“Mrs. Ingram?”

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was crying. Then in a minute he said petulantly, “Well, you were being unreasonable, you know. It was your own fault.”

He turned the handle of the door and pushed, and when it failed to open he began to lunge at it in rage, like a child in a tantrum. She watched the bolt in horror, expecting to see it torn off, but it continued to hold. “You want to kill me too, don’t you?” he shouted.

Then, as suddenly as it had commenced, the fury subsided. His footsteps went away.

She heard him moving around in the after cabin, and after a while the sound of hammering. It was impossible to guess what he was doing, but at least he wasn’t trying to smash down the door. Would John have decided by now that Saracen was stopped? Maybe he was already heading for them in the dinghy. She looked at her watch. It was 9:35. He could probably row it in an hour, or maybe even a little less.

But suppose something had happened to him back there when he’d tried to get back aboard? The last she’d seen of him, just before Warriner hit her, he’d been coming toward them as hard as he could row, directly in their path. No, you had to have something to hang onto or you’d go as mad as Warriner, and faith in John Ingram’s ability to cope with anything that could happen at sea was the one solid thing in sight. Even if he’d been run down, he would have got back aboard the other yacht, and he’d have the dinghy with him.

And if the other yacht were sinking, he’d keep it afloat somehow—

Her thoughts broke off and she looked around in wonder. It was the growl of the starter she’d heard. Hadn’t he even looked at the engine? Didn’t he know the distributor head was gone? The engine fired then and settled down to a steady rumble. She heard the clutch engage, and they began to move ahead.

She slumped forward with her face in her hands and wanted to give up and cry. She’d never thought to look in the spare-parts box to see if there was another one. She should have known. John detested engines, but he always said that if you were going to carry the stinking things around they might as well be in working condition when you needed them.

7

He’d acquired his first catboat at the age of twelve, and, except for two years at the University of Texas on the GI Bill just after World War II, he’d been around salt water and around boats ever since, most of his adult life as a professional. He’d captained a towboat in Mexico, worked on salvage jobs in half a dozen countries and three oceans, owned and skippered a charter yacht in the Bahamas, and up until eighteen months ago operated a shipyard in Puerto Rico. He’d been in an explosion and fire, and inevitably he’d seen bad weather and some that was worse, but at the moment he didn’t believe he’d ever been in a position quite as hopeless as this.

It was 2:45 p.m. Wearing a diving mask, he was some ten feet below the surface on Orpheus’s port side, just in under the turn of her bilge, looking at her from below, and the view was a chilling one. She’d never make port. And their pumping and bailing would accomplish nothing except to postpone from one hour to the next the moment she’d finally give up and go to the bottom.

When the breeze had stopped, they’d all three returned to throwing water out of her. Twenty minutes ago, after over an hour’s furious and unceasing effort, they had lowered the water level in the main cabin to a depth of around six inches. Their bailing buckets were coming up less than half full each time. He’d knocked the others off for a brief rest and questioned them. Had they hit anything? Driftwood, or a submerged object of any kind? In mid-Pacific, this was admittedly farfetched, but there had to be some reason for all that water.

It was Mrs. Warriner who supplied most of the answers. “No,” she said. “If she did, we didn’t feel it.”

“When you were running on power, was there any unusual vibration?” If they had a damaged propeller or bent shaft she might have opened up around the stern gland.

Mrs. Warriner shook her head. “No, it was perfectly normal. Anyway, we haven’t used the engine in over two weeks.”

“We used up all the gas trying to find Clipperton Island,” Bellew said. “Prince Hughie the Navigator knew where it was, but somebody kept moving it.”

She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply. “How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.

There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks ago when they were trying to beat their way back to Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded heavily.

“And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more pumping to keep her dry?”

Mrs. Warriner nodded. “I think so. But it wasn’t all of a sudden. Just a little more each day. And it must have been about three days ago it began to get really bad and come above the cabin floor when she rolled.”

“How was the weather then?”

She thought. “Nothing stronger than light breezes, as I recall. But the day before was squally and rough, and she pitched quite a bit.”

Ingram nodded and spoke to Bellew. “When you get your breath, turn to on the pump. I’m going below to see what I can find, and I’ll relieve you in half an hour.”

He was going through the doghouse when the thought of Rae poured suddenly through the defenses of his mind again, leaving him shaken and limp. No matter how you barricaded yourself against the fear, it lurked always in ambush just beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what you can’t.

Below, in the sodden ruin of the cabins, he’d checked the obvious things first, all the plumbing leading through the hull below the waterline. There were two heads. He couldn’t get a good look at the pipes because of the water swirling around them, but he could feel them with his hands. He wasn’t looking for a minor leak, but a flood. They were all right; none of them were broken. He crawled through a hatch into the flooded engine compartment under the doghouse. The big two-hundred-horsepower engine was submerged to its rusty cylinder head in oily water surging from side to side. He groped around for the intake to the cooling system and examined the line with his hands. It was intact. Then the leaks had to be in the hull itself—God alone knew where—and there was no way to find them unless you could get her dry inside so you could look.

But you couldn’t lower the water with the pump alone, and the buckets were useless after you got it as low as the cabin sole. Maybe there was a fire ax or hatchet aboard; he could chop away the cabin flooring below those two hatches and drop the buckets directly into the bilge. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light in the compartment now, and he looked around him, studying as much of the hull as was above the water. She was double-planked; he could see the diagonal seams of the inner skin. He took out his knife and began poking it at random into the wood. On the third plank the knife blade went into it as if it were a piece of bread. He felt a chill along the back of his neck and hurriedly started checking everywhere he could reach, even into the water below him. Large areas of the inner planking and of the frames themselves were spongy with dry rot.

He’d gone back on deck then and asked if there was a diving mask aboard. Mrs. Warriner told him where to find one. After kicking off his sneakers, he’d tossed the end of a line over the port side so he could get back aboard, and dropped in.

How long? he wondered now, peering upward through the mask. It was impossible to guess; too much depended on the weather. In the first hard squall she’d go to the bottom like a dropped brick. In at least three places just above him along the turn of the bilge where the green hair of marine growth waved endlessly as she rolled, he could see the loose butt-ends of planks sticking out where her fastenings had worked loose. Around them the calking was gone, the seams wide open for the full length of the plank. Keeping a respectful distance from the plunging and deadly mass above him, he swam to the surface and forward, around the bow. The starboard side was even worse. He counted six planks where the fastenings were coming out. He swam back and climbed aboard.

Bellew stopped pumping, and they came over to him as he stood dripping on deck under the brazen weight of the sun. “Did you find anything?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

He stripped off the mask and nodded. “Yes. But it’s nothing we can do anything about.”

“Then she’s going down?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t even make a guess as to how long we can keep her afloat, but she’ll never make the Marquesas.”

“What’s causing it?” Bellew asked.

“Dry rot. In the inner planking and some of the frames. It’s a disease, generally caused by lack of ventilation, and once it starts it spreads like smallpox. There may have been only a few small patches of it when you bought her, but whoever surveyed her missed ‘em apparently, and now it’s everywhere. What’s happening is that, even if the outer planking is still sound, the fastenings are pulling out; the wood inside is too soft to hold ‘em any more. Pounding in those squalls probably started them working loose, and now just the rolling sets up enough play and enough stresses to pull them out. The inner planking’s no doubt opening up the same way, and the more she works, the looser it all gets.”

“And there’s nothing we can do?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

“Nothing except keep pumping.”

She sat down at the break of the raised deck and lit a cigarette. She blew out the match and tossed it overboard. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ingram. It’s too bad we had to infect you.”

Still occupied with the practical problem of survival, and its vanishing possibility of solution, he was caught off guard by this lapse into the figurative. “Infect?”

“With our own particular dry rot. Our contagion of doom. We should have been flying a quarantine flag.”

Bellew had glanced involuntarily toward the dinghy still bumping against the side. Ingram saw him but didn’t even bother to speak; he merely shook his head. Twelve hundred miles from land, three people in an eight-foot dinghy designed to carry two the hundred yards or so from an anchored yacht to the dock, inside a harbor—a bicycle would be about as practical a lifeboat.

Bellew shrugged. “So it was stupid.” Then he went on, his eyes bleak. “But I guess you die hard, with unfinished business.”

“Who doesn’t?” Ingram asked.

“Sure, sure, you’d like to know what happened to your wife. Me, I’d just like two or three minutes with Hughie-boy.” He raised brutal hands and made a twisting motion with them, inches apart. Mrs. Warriner sickened and turned away in a silence that seemed almost palpably to echo with the creak and snap of parted vertebrae. Ingram felt sorry for her. “Never mind,” he said harshly to Bellew. “Get back to pumping.”

The other fell to without reply. As though conscious of them now only for the first time, Ingram looked at the bull neck and massive shoulders and arms, thinking that Bellew probably could kill a man with his bare hands. It was a good thing he’d got the jump on him to start with. Or had he? It was impossible to tell what Bellew thought, or why he took orders without argument. He had the look of a man it would be very dangerous to push, and the chances were this docility under curt commands was nothing but a realistic acceptance of the facts that Ingram knew the job better than he did and he had more chance of saving himself if he did as he was told.

Ingram sat down in the cockpit to put his sneakers back on. Water still dripped from his hair. Mrs. Warriner sat facing him, on the edge of the raised deck, her knees drawn up, moodily smoking. “What is your wife like?” she asked.

“Why?” He didn’t like the question; he saw no reason he should discuss Rae with these people.

“If she knows how to handle him, I don’t think he’ll hurt her.”

“I’d like to believe that,” he said bluntly. “But do you mean you didn’t know how to handle him? When I opened the cabin door down there and you thought it was him, you were scared to death.”

The brown eyes met his with perfect frankness. “The circumstances are different. He thinks we’re trying to kill him. Also, it wasn’t myself I was afraid for.”

Ingram nodded, remembering how Bellew had been poised with his club. At the same time, something else disturbed him. Presumably that was her cabin, hers and Warriner’s. Then if Warriner was on deck taking his trick at the pump when he’d sighted Saracen, why had Bellew been in there? But maybe Warriner had attacked him somewhere else and dragged him in there while he was unconscious. He shrugged. What difference did it make?

“Would she panic easily?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

“No,” Ingram said. “I don’t think she’d panic at all. Look, she’s no high-school girl, or jittery old maid with the vapors. She’s thirty-five years old, and she was married twice before she married me. Men are nothing new and startling to her. She’s never had to deal with an unbalanced one before, but she has been in tight spots, and she’s clever and coolheaded and she learns fast. She tried to fight him to get back to the wheel when he took it away from her, but all that happened very fast and it was pure reflex. If she survived—” His voice broke off, and he pulled savagely at the shoelace he was knotting. “If she survived that time, she’d know better than to antagonize him again. She’d play it by ear.”

“Is there a weapon of any kind aboard?”

He nodded. “A shotgun.”

Their eyes met again. Then she shivered slightly and looked down at the cigarette in her hands. Her voice was very small as she asked, “Could she?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does anybody, till he’s faced with it?”

“Is she aware that Orpheus is sinking?”

“All she knows is that there was water in her, and that your husband said she was. She won’t know what to believe now.”

“But the possibility—or probability—will still exist. So they’d be going off and leaving you to drown.” She was silent for a moment. “Have you been married long?”

“About four months. We were on our honeymoon.”

She nodded. “I can only give you the opinion of another woman who was, in effect, on her honeymoon. Both alternatives are impossible, of course, as long as you continue to weigh them. But inevitably there’ll be a point when she has to stop thinking, and it’ll become a simple matter of instinct versus conditioning. Instinct is a lot older.”

“She may not even remember the gun. Or know how to assemble it if she does—or get the chance, for that matter.”

“But she would know better than to try to threaten him with it? You know, the magic wand of television and B pictures?”

“Yes,” he said. “She’d know better than to point it unless she was prepared to shoot it.” He closed the discussion abruptly and stood up to look down the hatch. There was perceptibly more water in the after cabin than there had been thirty minutes ago. He motioned for Bellew to relinquish the pump.

“I’ll take over for a couple of hours. We can’t all work all the time, and I want to get some idea how fast it’s rising against pumping alone. So the two of you’d better turn in on the settees in there and see if you can get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”

“Right,” Bellew agreed. He started down the steps into the doghouse. Then he turned and asked, “How did he sucker you?”

Ingram explained briefly how Warriner had rowed out and come aboard, and the story he’d told. “It kept bothering me, especially his not wanting to come back aboard here or even wanting me to. But I had no real reason to doubt him, so I couldn’t very well force him to, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my wife on there alone with him until I knew more about him. Then he turned in, and I decided to have a look anyway. But apparently he wasn’t asleep. You didn’t even know he’d left?”

“No,” Bellew said. “When we heard you walking around, we thought it was still him. We didn’t know he’d sighted a rescue boat when he slugged me and locked us in there. A laugh a minute, that Hughie-boy. Like to run into him again some day.”

The contempt in Mrs. Warriner’s voice was like a whiplash. “Are you sure that’s why he hit you?”

“Why else, baby?” Bellew turned and went on below.

Ingram shrugged and began pumping. Mrs. Warriner remained where she was, turning slightly so she faced him. “I’m not sleepy,” she said. “Do you mind if I talk?”

“Go ahead,” he said.

She took a drag on her cigarette and stared moodily at the smoke. “I can understand your not wanting to talk about your wife under these circumstances—and least of all to me. But I’m trying to form a picture of her. Not to belabor the obvious any more than we have to, she’s the key to this, naturally; we know what’s going to happen on here, so if there is to be any other outcome it would have to hinge on what happens on there within the next few hours. You said she was thirty-five, which implies—or should imply—a certain amount of maturity. Is she pretty?”

“Yes,” Ingram said. “She’s very pretty.”

Her smile was fleeting and faintly tinged with sadness. “It was a silly question to ask a bridegroom. Is she blond or brunette?”

“Blond,” he said, still pumping. “Or in that jurisdiction. Her hair’s somewhere between golden blond and light brown-tawny, I think you’d call it—and the eyes are sea-green. High cheekbones, very smooth complexion, beautiful tan. Generally speaking, it’s the type of face and coloration that go with high spirit and a very low flashpoint in the temper department, but she grew up faster than the temper did, and somewhere along the line they gave her a sense of humor. Maybe she needed it, to marry me.”

“Don’t add too much modesty to your other virtues,” she said. “It’ll sound phony. Does she have any children?”

“No. She had a boy, but he died. Polio.”

“I’m sorry. That was the first marriage?”

“The second. The first marriage was one of those kid things, during the war. That is, the Second World War—”

“Thank you, Mr. Ingram. But I know which one you mean. Go on.”

“She wasn’t quite seventeen, and he was a navigator in the Eighth Air Force. After the war he went back to school on the GI Bill, pre-med student. She worked, and they lived in a Quonset hut—you remember the routine. They were both too young for it, I guess; anyway, he was failing all his subjects and they began to fight and it didn’t last. She went back to Texas, and they were divorced. The second marriage was another thing. No divorce; he was killed in an airplane crash.”

“How old would the boy be if he’d lived?”

“Around twelve, I think.”

“Does she attract children?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her around any.”

“How about the lost, the insecure, the dependent, the scared?”

He saw the shadow of pain in her eyes again and knew what she meant. “She has a great deal of tenderness and sympathy,” he said. “I don’t know how apparent it’ll be after she’s just been slugged—”

“He’ll know, don’t worry. It’s like radar. And he brings it out if it’s been latent for years. With that, plus a reasonable amount of intelligence, I think she can handle him, provided she doesn’t panic.”

“Why does he think you tried to kill him?”

“He thinks Bellew and I are lovers. And that we planned to do away with him and Estelle.” She made no attempt to look away. The brown eyes were completely without expression now, however, and he could only guess at the torment behind them. “Unfortunately, there is some justification for his thinking so. And it’s my fault. I blamed the whole thing on Bellew awhile ago, but that was in anger. I’m probably as much responsible for his crackup as Bellew is, in a different way.”

Ingram was beginning to like her and found that difficult to believe. Maybe she was too accustomed to taking the rap for everything; Warriner had struck him as an alibi artist who’d load it on anybody in sight. “Well, look, your husband’s a grown man, or supposed to be—”

“The type of woman he attracts, or is attracted to, never gave him a chance to be one. And it’s too late now.”

“What happened?” Ingram asked.

For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she said, “That’s a good question, and I wish I could answer it. Specifically, what happened was a very tragic accident. The accident itself is difficult enough to explain, but to understand why it smashed him you’d have to go back a long way. When was the first time, Mr. Ingram, that you realized it was possible for this environment of ours to be unfriendly, and that it was also possible to find yourself utterly alone in it? I mean, with nobody to take your head in her lap and tell you everything was going to be all right, that the critics were wrong, that the bank must have forgotten to credit your last deposit, that the pathologist must have made a mistake, or the teacher that gave you a D was just being spiteful?”

“I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “Probably a long time ago.”

“Precisely. While you were still quite young, and under relatively harmless circumstances, and over the years you built up—well, not an immunity, nobody’s immunized—but call it a progressively higher threshold of susceptibility. It happened to Hughie for the first time at the age of twenty-eight, alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without even a lifebelt, and he was there because he’d been betrayed by the one person he’d been conditioned all his life to trust and depend on— his mother, in one of her successive manifestations.”

“Aren’t you riding yourself pretty hard?” Ingram asked.

“No. I don’t think so.” She gazed out across the metallic glare of the sea to where the sun had already begun its descent into the west. “If you know the conditions when you accept the appointment, you also accept the responsibility. I let him down.”

8

She was silent for a moment. How did you explain Hughie to a man who’d seen only the wreckage after he’d been shattered by the Pacific Ocean, by Bellew’s contemptuous bullying, and by her own misguided attempts to help him? How make him see the wit, the charm, the sensitivity, the genuine talent behind the beach-boy good looks?

Strangely enough, when she’d first met Hughie, a little over a year ago, he’d been living on a yacht. It was on the island of Rhodes, snuggled up under the Turkish coast on almost the opposite side of the world from where she was now, and the yacht, a glittering and obviously expensive yawl registered under the Panamanian flag, appeared to be more or less permanently moored in that harbor astride whose entrance the Colossus had towered two thousand years before. Hughie was living aboard it alone, and he was painting.

Oh, it wasn’t his yacht, it belonged to a friend who was only letting him live on it, he’d disclaimed with a refreshing and boyish honesty that couldn’t help appealing to a woman who’d known her share of phonies on two continents. It wasn’t until somewhat later—too late, in fact—that she learned his frankness had been a little less than complete, that the friend was female, a wealthy American divorcee living in Rome, and that Hughie’s relationship to her was one for which “protégé” was as good a euphemism as any. By that time she was—as she would have put it if she’d still been in any condition to view the thing with her old self-honesty and clarity of thought—hooked herself.

She saw him as a talented but too-beautiful boy who was being ruined by a continuously self-renewing matriarchy of lionizing sponsors, benefactresses, patronesses-of-art-at-the-source, surrogate mothers, and rapaciously protective beldames who started out wanting to adopt him and wound up by sandbagging him with the flushed and hectic urgencies of some autumnal reflowering and dragging him off to bed. And by the time she should have begun to suspect the weakness in his character she had made the further discovery that he wasn’t a boy at all, that he was twenty-seven instead of the twenty she had thought, and she was hopelessly in love with him.

She was forty years old then and widowed nearly two years, no longer a victim of the grief and numbness of loss but only of its emptiness, the feeling that she must have been left over for something if she could only discover what it was. She’d come to Europe again. Since she belonged to a set to which the jet flight across the Pole was only a commute hop, she had friends in London, Paris, Antibes, Florence, and God knew where else, but she had avoided them, going on instead to Istanbul and then back to Athens and Corfu and a footloose and unscheduled wandering through the Dodecanese, searching for she knew not what. She’d arrived in Rhodes around the middle of July for a four-day stay. She’d met Hughie, and the four days had become a week, and then two, and finally a month.

“He’s a painter,” she went on. “A good one. And, given a chance, he might have become a great one. It wasn’t his fault that women could never leave him alone—”

“If I’m not mistaken,” Ingram broke in, “nothing is ever Hughie’s fault.”

She nodded somberly. “To some extent, that’s true—if oversimplified. But there are reasons for it.”

“I’m not knocking it. Probably a very comforting philosophy, as long as you can keep from having to sign for the mess sometime when there’s nobody around to hand it to.”

“It’s the way he was raised,” she said. “He’s never had a chance. Even his childhood was against him. He’s seen his father only once, and very briefly, in the past seventeen years. Though he’s never said so directly, I gather he either hated him or was afraid of him, and probably at least some of it must have been his mother’s fault. Certainly the picture that comes through from the few things he has said is one of such utter crudity and brutality it seems a little too one-sided to be quite true.

“His father was—or is, rather—the editor and publisher of a small daily newspaper in Mississippi, an ex-football player at one of the Southern universities, and from all accounts a man whose only passions apparently were drinking, random and indiscriminate affairs with very sordid women, white supremacy, and shooting quail. That plus bullying Hughie because the boy showed more interest in sketching animals than in killing them. It could be that all of this is literally true, in spite of its familiarity, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a certain amount of editing by the doting mother and embittered ex-wife. At any rate, when Hughie was eleven his parents separated and were later divorced. His mother, who had a little money of her own, took him to Switzerland. He went to a private school in Lausanne but lived with her all the time in the villa she rented there so they wouldn’t be separated. She never remarried. You can see the pattern, of course, the possessiveness, the overprotection, the you’d-never-leave-Mumsy-would-you-after-all-she’s-done-for-you rubbish. After the school in Switzerland he attended the Sorbonne for two years and then began studying art, also in Paris, and also still living with his mother. She died five or six years ago. There was a little money left, but not enough to keep him going until he could get some kind of recognition as a painter. However—” She smiled with a tinge of bitterness, and went on. “Europe is crawling with middle-aged women eager to help the struggling young artist, especially if he’s charming and decorative and well mannered and has no social liabilities like cutting off his ears or wasting too much time painting.”

She broke off then with an impatient gesture, as though annoyed at herself. “I’m sorry. You asked me about the accident. As I said, it’s difficult to explain how it could have happened. Fortunately you know the interior layout here, which will help. Hughie and I occupied the after cabin, and Mr. and Mrs. Bellew the forward one—”

Ingram interrupted. “But first, who is Bellew, anyway? Somehow, I don’t place him in this. Is he a friend, or a neighbor of yours in Santa Barbara?”

“I’m not from Santa Barbara,” she replied. “San Francisco. We just bought the boat in Santa Barbara and sailed from there in the beginning.” She shook another cigarette out of the pack and held the latter up toward Ingram at the pump.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“You don’t smoke?”

“Only cigars.” He wished he had one, but among the other things he was wishing for at the moment it didn’t have a very high priority. “But about Bellew?”

“He’s a writer.” Then, catching Ingram’s look of surprise, she smiled faintly. “No, he doesn’t remind you a great deal of Proust or Henry James. He’s a specialized type of writer; he does articles for outdoor magazines. Hunting and fishing.”

“Wait.” Ingram frowned. “Bellew? Russell Bellew? I think I’ve seen some of his stories. Marlin fishing, and hunting sheep in Mexico. With some beautiful photography, as I recall.”

“His wife did the photography. She was an artist with a camera.”

Ingram stopped pumping for a moment and walked past her to the open hatch to look down into the cabin. In spite of his continuous pumping, the water was still rising. His face was somber as he walked back to the pump.

She lit the cigarette and carefully blew out the match. “Still gaining?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. She was a cool one, he thought; and so, for that matter, was Bellew. That was something, anyway; at least he didn’t have a couple of screamers on his hands. Of course there was no telling how they’d take it later on. But then, he added grimly, there was no telling how he’d do, either; it was something you couldn’t forecast.

“But we can still hold it by bailing too, can’t we?”

“Yes,” he replied. “We can now.”

“But not for long?”

“Just how long, I don’t know. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not going to get any better, but it is going to get progressively worse, with this rolling. And in a bad squall, as I told you, she could come apart like a bale of shingles. But forgetting the squall, which we can’t do anything about anyway, she might last for a week yet…” His voice trailed off.

She glanced up questioningly. “There’s something else?”

There was no reason to try to hide it from her, he thought. “Only this—even if we do keep her afloat for another week, after tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, it’s not going to do any good anyway. There’s not a chance in a million we’ll be sighted by a ship, not where we are. And even if one happened to pick us up on radar, there’s nothing to indicate we’re in distress.

“So, as you said, the only thing that could change it is if Rae is still on there and is able to cope with your husband. She might even be able to talk him into coming back. If she does, we’ll probably be all right. The second possibility is that she may be able to get control of the boat some way. He’ll have to sleep sometime, or …” He stopped, floundering.

She nodded, her face devoid of expression. “Or she may kill him. Go on.”

If she could manage it, he could too. “Right,” he said just as calmly. “But even if she does get control of the boat, it’s nowhere near as simple as it sounds. She may never find us again. They’re over the horizon now, and unless she knows the course he was steering when he left here, she can’t come back because she won’t know which way back is. Also, at the speed they were going, somewhere around midnight tonight and about a hundred miles from here they’re going to run out of gas, and she can’t make it back unless she gets some wind. In these conditions, it could take days. Also, at that distance, the accumulated errors of trying to make good a course while she’s fighting fluky breezes and calms become so great that after a while she won’t know within twenty miles where she is herself.

“She can’t call for help, to get a search organized, even if there was anybody out here to look. We’ve got a radiotelephone, but it won’t reach land from here, and you can’t call a ship with it because they stand their radio watches on five hundred kilocycles and not the phone bands.

“So if she ever finds us again it’ll be within the next twelve hours or so, because if they get any farther away there’s practically no chance. Have you got any distress flares aboard?”

“No,” she said. “We thought we had a can of them but we’ve never been able to find them.”

“How about oil lamps? We’ve got to have something she can see if she comes back tonight.”

“We have some flashlights. The big long ones.”

“Good. They’ll do. Well leave the mainsail hoisted, and lash two of them to the shrouds so they’ll shine on it. You can see an arrangement like that for miles.”

“That’s clever. I wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“It’s an old trick in heavy traffic or poor visibility. Steamship captains trying to figure out what it is may call you things that’d raise blisters on a gun turret, but at least they won’t run you down.”

“I’m glad—” She stopped.

“What?”

“I was about to commit the incredible gaucherie of saying I was glad you’d come along. Let’s just say that under other circumstances— May I relieve you at the pump now?”

“Are you sure you’re not sleepy?”

“Yes.”

“All right. You take over here, and I’ll start bailing again.”

He moved over to the hatch. Before he dropped the bucket in, he paused to look at an ugly mass of cloud along the horizon to the northeast. It looked like a nasty one, all right, but it was a long way off. He’d just have to keep an eye on it.

* * *

Saracen shuddered, protesting the engine vibration, and pitched with a long corkscrew motion as she continued to plow ahead. Here in the tiny compartment the air was stifling. Rae Ingram was conscious of thirst, and of the sour taste of vomit in her mouth. She sat on the bunk and stared unbelievingly at the barricaded door. She must be mad herself; Paradise couldn’t have become this nightmare in the few short hours since sunrise, since this morning’s dawn when she’d been alone with John on the immensity of the sea, when she’d swum nude beside the boat with that faint but shivery sensation of wickedness—and amusement, because it was a ridiculous way to act at thirty-five—when he’d used a whole quart of priceless fresh water to wash the salt out of her hair because, as he said, he loved her. Could you go from that to this in three hours? Numbly she looked down at her watch. It was 9:50. It had been a quarter of an hour since Warriner had restarted the engine and they’d got under way again.

She tried to force her mind to operate. She was apparently safe enough for the moment from any further assaults upon the door; as long as Saracen was under way, he had to be at the wheel. Also, he was apparently dangerous only when opposed. But that was unimportant. She still had to stop him. There was no way she could disable the engine now; she’d already grasped what that hammering was she’d heard in the after end of the main cabin. He’d nailed up the access to the engine compartment so she couldn’t get in—at least without making enough noise to warn him. Mad or not, he would have taken some precaution, and that was simpler than trying to lock her in here. The door opened inward, and there was no bolt or hasp on the outside.

Then what? The only other place the engine could be stopped was at the control panel right in front of him in the cockpit. But wait, she thought suddenly. It had already been fifteen minutes since they’d started up again, and the other boat—what was it Warriner had called it, Orpheus?—had been almost hull down then. And from the sound of the engine it was still running at nearly full throttle. So merely stopping Saracen would do no good now, anyway. By this time they were out of sight over the horizon, and John would never know it. Then the whole problem was changed, and now it was even worse. Somehow she had to get control of the boat so she could take it back— Her thoughts broke off, and she sat up abruptly, feeling a chill along her spine.

Take it back? Back where?

She’d forgotten she had no idea at all which direction they’d been traveling since they’d left the other yacht. And with it lost somewhere over the horizon now, where all directions looked the same, trying to go back to it could be just as hopeless at ten miles as at a thousand. First of all and above everything else, she had to find out and keep track of their course. But how?

The answer occurred to her almost immediately. In one of the drawers under the bunks in the main cabin was a spare compass, a small one mounted on gimbals in a wooden box. She sprang up and began furiously hauling the sailbags from in front of the barricaded door. She dragged the cases of stores to one side, slid back the bolt, and peered out. The main cabin was empty.

It took only a minute. She hurried to the sink, softly pumped a cup of water, washed out her mouth, and drank, noting at the same time she’d been right about the access to the engine compartment. The panel was nailed shut. The compass was under the port bunk. Keeping an apprehensive eye on the hatch, she grabbed it out, snatched up a pencil and a pad of scratch paper from in back of the folding chart table, and slipped back inside the forward compartment.

She was about to close the door when another thought occurred to her. While she was able to get out into the other cabin, why not try the radio? If she did it carefully, there was a good chance Warriner wouldn’t hear her. Of course! It was worth the risk.

He’d said the radio on the other boat was ruined by water, but he’d also said he’d used it trying to call them. Which was the truth? It would take only a few minutes to find out. If it was still in working order, John would have it turned on, waiting; there was no doubt at all of that. Keyed up with excitement, she set the compass on the bunk with a pillow against it to keep it from rolling off, and slipped back out the door, closing it softly behind her.

The radio was mounted on bulkhead brackets above the after end of the starboard bunk, the transmitter and receiver in one unit. From there she was still invisible to Warriner at the wheel, and by facing toward the hatch she’d be able to see it darken even before his legs appeared if he started down. There was a loudspeaker, but a switch for cutting it out. She threw the switch to the off position, turned on the receiver, and set the bandswitch to 2638 kilocycles, one of the two inter-ship bands.

Still nervously watching the hatch, she lifted the handset off its bracket. This actuated the switch starting the transmitter. The little rotary converter whirred softly; there was no chance Warriner could hear it above the noise of the engine. She put the handset to her ear and adjusted the gain of the receiver. The tubes had warmed up now. Static popped and hissed, but no one was calling. She reached over and turned the bandswitch to 2738 kilocycles. This was dead too, except for the static.

The transmitter was warmed up now. She pressed the handset button and adjusted the antenna tuning control for maximum indication on the meter. It was working beautifully.

“Saracen to Orpheus” she whispered into the microphone, though there was really no necessity to say anything; as soon as John heard the carrier come on he’d know who it was. There was nobody else out here. “This is the yacht Saracen calling Orpheus. Come in, please.”

She released the transmit button and listened. Static crackled. She waited thirty seconds. Forty. There was no answer. She called again. There was still no response, no sound of a carrier coming on the air. If he was listening, it must be on the other band; maybe it was the only one Orpheus had. She threw the bandswitch and retuned the antenna control.

“Saracen to Orpheus, Saracen to Orpheus,” she whispered. “This is the yacht Saracen calling Orpheus. Answer on either band. Come in, please.”

She cut the transmitter and listened again, turning the band-switch back and forth between the two channels. The only sound was the eternal crackling and hissing of static from far-off squalls pursuing their violent paths across the wastes of the southern hemisphere. She called twice more on each channel. There was no answer. She replaced the handset, turned off the receiver, and went back inside the forward cabin, wishing now she hadn’t thought of the radio.

9

But she still had the compass. She picked it up from the bunk, removed the lid from the box, and looked about for a place to set it. It had to be oriented as nearly as possible in a plane with the vessel’s fore-and-aft centerline, and it had to be secured so it couldn’t move. The after bulkhead, she thought, to the right of the door and far enough away from it so it wouldn’t be disturbed by moving the sailbags. She set it on the deck with the after side of the box flush with the bulkhead and cast about for something to hold it in place. Not cases of canned goods; cans were steel. One of the sailbags, of course; there was an extra one. She shoved it up, against the forward side of the box. That would hold it.

She knelt beside it, studying the movements of the card. It was reading 227 degrees. Then 228 … 229 … 228 … 227 … 226 … 226 … 225 … 224 … 223 … 224, 225, 226 … 226 … 226 … At the end of two or three minutes it had swung no further than from 220 to 231 degrees, and most of the time had remained between 223 and 229. The course he was steering was probably 226 degrees. She glanced at her watch and wrote it down on the scratch pad.

10:14 AM 226 degrees Est. speed 6 knots

That would do it, she thought. All that was necessary now was to keep watch on it to see if he changed. There was no certainty, she knew, that this reading of 226 degrees was anywhere near the actual course, the one he was steering in the cockpit; they might even differ by as much as 20 or 30 degrees. John had already taught her that much about the care and the mysterious natures of magnetic compasses. That one up there had been corrected by a professional compass-adjuster who’d inserted in the binnacle the bar magnets necessary to cancel out the errors induced by the vessel’s own magnetism, mostly from the massive iron keel and the engine. This one wasn’t adjusted, of course, and was in a different location besides, but it didn’t matter as long as it didn’t move out of the alignment it was in now. All she had to do, if she ever got control of the boat, was to put it on a general heading of 226 on this compass and then take the correct reading off that one in the cockpit. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would take a lot of running back and forth to average out the error of several tries, but it could eventually be done within an accuracy necessary for the job of retracing their route from the other boat. Provided it wasn’t too far …

For a few minutes she’d forgotten the rest of the problem in her satisfaction at being able to solve this minor part of it, but it all rushed back now and hit her like an icy sea. She sat down, weak-kneed, on one of the other sailbags and regarded end-to-end those two conditions she’d danced across separately and so lightly a moment before.

If she ever got control of the boat … Provided it wasn’t too far …

How was she going to get control of it?

Trying to reason with him, she had already discovered, was futile. Trying to overpower him was so manifestly absurd there was no point wasting time even thinking about it. There was the further fact, already demonstrated, that he regarded any interference with his flight—and probably opposition of any kind—as part of some terrifying conspiracy against his life, and while he was in the grip of this delusion he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. Five minutes later he would be sorry, and he’d probably cry over her body, but that wouldn’t do her a great deal of good if she was already dead. Nor, more to the point, would it save John. So anything she tried from now on had to succeed the first time.

In the back of her mind, of course, there’d been the knowledge that in the end he had to go to sleep sometime. Then she would simply tie him up, turn the boat around, and go back to get John. But now, a little fearfully, she brought this comforting backlog out into the light and began to examine it more closely. In the first place, you couldn’t tie a man up just because he was asleep; he’d wake up. So she’d have to hit him on the head with something. She knew nothing whatever about knocking people unconscious by hitting them on the head, in spite of the easy and apparently painless way it appeared to be accomplished all the time on television, and unless she was able to overcome her natural revulsion to such an act and did it brutally enough and in the right place he’d only wake up and choke her to death. And in the second place, how about that panel into the engine compartment? If he’d remembered to nail that up so she couldn’t tamper with the engine again, he certainly wasn’t going to go to sleep and leave himself unprotected. All he had to do was close the companion hatch and fasten it on the outside, and she’d be locked below.

But it was the third objection that finally wrecked it. He wasn’t going to sleep—not in time to save John. Whatever horror he was fleeing from was still pursuing him down the dark corridors of the mind, and as long as the engine continued to run, he would. She knew no more about abnormal mental states than the average layman, but she was aware that a man in the grip of obsession or some pathological fear could be immune to fatigue for incredible lengths of time. He’d stay right there at the wheel until the engine died for lack of fuel.

How much gasoline did they have? Saracen’s cruising range on power was around two hundred miles. The tank had been full when they left Panama, but John ran the engine for short periods every day or so to charge the batteries and to keep the engine itself from succumbing to the saturated humidity of the tropics. Call it a total of ten hours in the nineteen days. At the moderate speed John drove the engine when he was using it, that would be forty-five or fifty miles. So at cruising speed they should have fuel for a hundred and fifty miles or about thirty hours. But Warriner was running the engine almost wide open, which would increase the fuel consumption tremendously. She wasn’t sure how much, but John had said once that beyond a certain point increasing the speed one knot would almost double it. So call it fifteen to eighteen hours, at six knots. And from nine o’clock this morning … Sometime between midnight tonight and three o’clock tomorrow morning they would run out of fuel, ninety to a hundred and ten miles from that foundering hulk John was trapped on.

Then what?

The answer was short, inescapable, and merciless. She’d never find it again.

Assume Warriner was incautious enough to drop off to sleep in the cockpit without locking her below, and she was able to knock him out and tie him up—she’d have no fuel, of course, to go back with, so she’d have to sail back. In the interminable calms and fickle airs they’d been fighting for the past two weeks, that could take three or four days. But that wasn’t the really, deadly part of it, not by far. Sailing back, she just wouldn’t find the place; she couldn’t navigate well enough.

Steering a course under power was one thing; averaging out a course while you were beating all over the ocean on a dozen different headings at varying speeds for different lengths of time, and drifting helplessly at the mercy of uncertain currents for long periods of calm was something else entirely. The only way you could do it over any distance at all was with competent celestial navigation. John was teaching her, and she knew how to use the tables, but she was nowhere near accurate enough yet with the sextant. She could do it if she was trying to make a landfall on some headland visible thirty miles at sea, but if she missed the other yacht by more than four miles she’d never see it at all.

This was besides the fact that at the end of three or four days it wouldn’t even be in the same place anyway. Even if it were too full of water to move under sail, currents would still act on it.

And it was sinking. She’d seen herself, from the way it lurched from side to side on the groundswell, there was lots of water in it, and the radio was dead.

Sometime around sunset this evening they would pass the point of no return. After that, they would have used up more than half the gasoline, and every ten minutes would be another mile that nothing would ever buy back—

Sunset. Suddenly, and with such piercing clarity it made her cry out, she saw him struggling in the water, alone on the emptiness of the sea, as the sun went down and the colors began to fade. She could see every line and angle of the face her finger tips had come to know so well, the sun-wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and that horrible way she had cut his hair; the eyes themselves were open, the clear, cool gray eyes that could be ironic or amused but were far more often gentle, and there seemed to be no fear in them even now but only something she thought was sadness or regret. He made no sound. And there was no lifebelt. If you ever lost a boat, he’d said once, in a place where there was no chance of being picked up, you were better off without it.

She began to shake, all over and uncontrollably, and fell back on the pile of sailbags with the back of her left forearm pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.

One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it away.

He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God, why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way to stop him. There had to be.

It was then she remembered the shotgun.

Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back, reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the starboard bunk. John had never assembled it since he’d brought it aboard but he did check it from time to time to be sure it hadn’t been attacked by rust. He was going to hunt something with it in Australia, or maybe it was New Zealand. In the same drawer were two boxes of its ammunition…

It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.

She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel, gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?

She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine, she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before she went too far.

There was another thing, too, she thought with growing excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this other way.

The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked. She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt and opened the door.

She crossed the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered cautiously out. Her head was still below the level of the deckhouse, but she could see him—or rather, she could see his head and the naked shoulders. He was seated behind the wheel, staring into the binnacle.

He still hadn’t looked up, and she had no intention of venturing farther into his territory until he’d seen her and she could assess his reaction. From here she could still make it back to safety before he could get out from behind the wheel and catch her, but going too far would be like misjudging the length of chain by which some dangerous wild animal was secured. She waited, thinking of this and conscious of the incongruity or even the utter madness of the simile. Dangerous? This nice, well-mannered, unbelievably handsome boy who might have stepped right out of a mother’s dream? That was the horror of it, she thought. Conscious evil or malicious intent you could at least communicate with, but Warriner was capable of destroying her with the pointlessness and the perfect innocence of a falling safe, and with its same imperviousness to argument.