Dead calm

He glanced up then and saw her. He smiled in evident pleasure and said something she couldn’t hear above the noise of the engine. It might be a trick, of course, to entice her within range, but she had to risk it. She went up the ladder, trying to hold her arm as naturally as possible while it clamped the end of the marlinspike inside her blouse. The sea was still like glass, aside from the long undulations of the swell, and after the dimness below she was dazzled for a moment by the shimmering glow of sunlight reflected from it. She stepped out onto the narrow strip of deck along the starboard side of the cockpit, very scared now and pretending to look aft along their wake as though searching for the other boat. Slowly, she thought; stop a minute, and then another step or two, and don’t try to smile; that would be too phony—

“No,” he said. “Sit down there.” He indicated the starboard cockpit seat and then added, “Where I can see you.”

It was impossible to tell by his tone or manner whether he suspected her of something, but she hesitated only a second. She didn’t have to go all the way back at once, and it would never do to argue with him. “Why?” she asked, but she sat down, some two or three feet forward of the binnacle and the wheel, with her left arm falling naturally at her side.

“Because your face fascinates me,” he said, tilting his head slightly to the left and leaning over the wheel to view it better. “You have no idea what a study it would have made the way you were looking up and out at me like some hesitant naiad from a grotto—no. Naiads were Greek. You’re Scandinavian.”

“Partly,” she managed to say. She didn’t even know whether he’d meant it as a question or not.

“Oh, definitely Scandinavian. Under your clothes you’re probably as blond as snow.” He smiled, as though to reassure her that at their level of sophistication there was nothing tendentious in this discussion of her private blondness. “But it was your face we were talking about, the magnificent bone structure. Do you know you’ll still be a beautiful woman when you’re eighty? I’m speaking as a professional. I’m a painter, and painters always approach a face from the other side, to see what’s holding it up. Those high cheekbones and the tilted eyes are racial, of course; people say Slavic, or Tartar, or a half-dozen other things, but to me they’re always Scandinavian. If they came out of western or central Asia it must have been along the Arctic Circle…”

He was still too far away to hit, even if he should happen to turn his head. For a moment she saw the whole scene with a sort of wondering horror—a civilized woman of the twentieth century, sitting here with the marlinspike of the Cape Stiff bully-boys secreted against her flesh between her nylon panties and her bra, listening while this handsome boy who was murdering her husband as surely as if he’d used a gun discussed with such charm and evident admiration the structure of her face. How much more of it could she stand? The point of no return was sunset, and if she was still alive then she’d be as mad as he was.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t do anything, she thought, trying to isolate or identify the ultimate nightmare quality of it; she wasn’t tied, or locked up, or even openly threatened, and there was nothing to stop her now from leaping across that narrow space with the marlinspike aswing—nothing except that it might fail, and one chance was all she was going to get. It always came back to that. She had a life expectancy of just one more unsuccessful attempt to stop him, and then John would drown.

Then was she already becoming paralyzed with indecision, like a boy with only one dime in a candy store, unable to make up his mind until the store had already closed and he was out on the sidewalk? She didn’t know, but she could see it coming. The stakes were too high, the pressure too brutal. Nobody was equipped to hold entirely in his hands the life of the person he loved above everything else on earth—no, not even in his hands, but poised like an egg on the back of one of them as though for an obstacle race in some macabre party game. Not even professionals, she thought; the surgeon called in another surgeon when the life of his own child was at stake.

10

But when he was quiet like this—if not rational, at least for the moment not in the seizure of that torment or terror—why in God’s name couldn’t she get through to him? It was obvious at a glance what kind of boy he was, and the way he’d been brought up; he’d open doors for you, give you his seat on a bus, or bring you a drink at a cocktail party. And while she suspected there might not be any great strength in him, there was no doubt he was educated, civilized, and probably incapable of deliberate evil or pointless cruelty until this thing, whatever it was, had happened to him. Then why wasn’t she able to reach in past the snarled wire-ends of his broken lines of communication and make contact with him, get him to realize what he was doing?

Maybe she hadn’t tried hard enough. Or she’d tried in the wrong way; she’d been half hysterical herself, and she’d screamed at him. And then she’d talked down to him, as though it were a recognized fact between them there was something wrong with his mind. Of course, she’d known the error of this the moment it was done, but it was too late to correct.

Anyway, try once more, she thought, and with a better approach; see if you can’t establish some kind of contact before even bringing up the subject of going back. Get him to talk about himself? No-o. She hated to throw out the oldest weapon in the arsenal, but there she’d be flirting with the very danger she had to avoid, any reminder of the horror he was fleeing. The past, maybe, but stay away from the voyage; whatever it was happened at sea. Talk about painting, even if you don’t know much about it, talk about yourself. That was it, she thought; if she could establish an identity he could recognize, first merely as a woman who was friendly and sympathetic, and then as one he could help in some way, she might penetrate the insularity of breakdown and get through, at least temporarily, to the old behavior patterns. God, if she could only get him to pick up the phone.

“… it’s an overworked word,” he was saying, “but definitely valid here. I know I could feel it.”

She came back with a start. Was he still talking about her face? “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I missed that. What was it?”

“Empathy,” he replied. “Sometimes you meet people you’re in full conversation with before a word has ever been said. It was that way when I first saw you. Oh, I don’t mean the sex thing—though God knows you have plenty of that.” Again his smile included her among the mature and the intelligent. He glanced into the compass and then back at her, leaning over the wheel. “I knew we’d like each other. I knew I could talk to you, and neither of us would need an interpreter. But I don’t even know your first name yet.”

“It’s Rae,” she said. It was starting out beautifully; he was doing it himself. There were cigarettes and a lighter in the right-hand pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She took them out and tried to light one. In the six-knot breeze of their passage, it didn’t take too much acting ability to fail three times in succession.

“Here, let me,” he offered.

He lit the cigarette for her and passed it back, and lit one for himself. Good, she thought; one conditioned response might lead to another, and then another… Then it occurred to her she could be oversimplifying just a little the labyrinthine complexities of modern psychiatry; if doctors spent lifetimes trying to find out why a mind went off the rails and how to get it back, there seemed a chance it wasn’t quite that easy. But at least she was doing something. Saracen heaved up and swayed, quartering the long groundswell. Sunlight shattered into golden points of fire in his hair, and the fine gray eyes were alight with interest as they continued to search her face. She tried not to remember the way they’d looked when he was strangling her.

“Thank you, Hughie,” she said simply. Don’t overdo it; don’t gush.

“Je vous en prie, madame.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.” She was about to add that John was teaching her Spanish, but didn’t. Probably it was best to keep John out of it until she had some kind of bridge across the gap.

“I detect just a trace of Southern accent, I think. From where?”

“Texas,” she replied.

“Oil?”

She shook her head. “Every area has its slum dwellers. There are Texans who don’t own oil wells.”

“See, I knew we’d like each other.” Then he added, “I’m from Mississippi. Or was originally.” He explained briefly he’d gone to school in Switzerland and spent most of his life in Europe.

“Are your parents still there?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “My mother’s dead. She died six years ago.”

“I’m sorry. But your father is still living?”

The change in him was startling, attuned as she was to every nuance of his expression. “No!” he said loudly. “I mean—I don’t know!” Agitation was evident in his eyes, and she could sense his desperate groping through the mists in back of them.

Then he appeared to regain control. “I mean, I haven’t seen him for years. He still lives in Mississippi, and we never write to each other.”

She breathed softly. That had been close. It was obvious she’d made a mistake, but she couldn’t understand where or how. Surely his father hadn’t been on the boat. Pretend you didn’t see it, she told herself, and change the subject, fast.

But he had already fully recovered, as though it had never happened. He smiled at her and said, “Never mind me; you still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Except that you’re from Texas, which you’ll admit yourself is trite. When they get to the moon, they’ll find out there’s not only a Texan there, but he’s already bought it, air-conditioned it, and organized a local chapter of the John Birch Society. I could tell you more than that about yourself, just for a start. The chances are you weren’t an only child; you had a very good orthodontist when you were young, or ancestors with exceptional teeth; you’re warmhearted, and you have a great deal of sympathy and understanding, but you’re impulsive; and status probably means little or nothing to you. All surface, of course, and some guesswork. So you take it. Tell me what the leopard was looking for on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.” His gesture included all the vast and empty Pacific. “Just a parking place, or did he hear music?”

And the leopard was dead, she thought. But more immediately, that lightning reversal of mood was ominous; even when he was like this, he was further from reality than she’d believed. Well, you still had to try.

“He heard music,” she said. “Perhaps not very good music, and maybe even sentimental, or trite. But he also saw something up there.”

“What?” he asked. “Samarkand? A trail disappearing into the mist? Not the edge of a map, because maps don’t have edges any more. They just say continued on E-12.”

“No,” she said. “What he saw was simply another leopard listening to the same thing. A rather handsome leopard in a furry and beat-up sort of way, with the same odd taste for Mickey Mouse music and listening to it in strange places. It was like this.”

She didn’t like doing it; revealing herself this way to a stranger was too much like filling out a Kinsey questionnaire or undressing in public, but, weighed against any possible chance of success, the cost was small. She took a puff on her cigarette and wondered where to begin. Anywhere, she thought, just so you make him see you.

“One night about a year ago a man came to the hotel where I was registered in Miami, Florida. He was a curt, rather hardbitten sort of man with too much arrogance and a slight limp, and I didn’t think I liked him. And apparently it was mutual; he didn’t seem to think too highly of me. I did believe he was honest, though, which was important in the particular circumstances. And the reason I thought he was honest was that anybody that disagreeable and that indifferent to the impression he made on other people almost had to be.

“The reason for our being there—for my being in Miami at all, and for his being in my hotel room—was a yacht, a big two-masted schooner named Dragoon. It was mine—or had been. It also had quite a bit to do with the lack of friendliness in the meeting. In the first place, there was probably a sensed difference of attitude as to what a sailing yacht really was. To me it was just a piece of property, like a parcel of land or a stock certificate, that I happened to own, mostly by accident, and which I’d been aboard only once in the two years I had owned it. To him a boat—a good one—represented something else. But besides this, and much more important, was the fact Dragoon had just been stolen, and he was suspected by the police of having helped to steal it. They’d picked him up and questioned him, and then released him because they didn’t have any actual proof, not enough to hold him. I gathered from the police they’d had a difficult time with him; he wasn’t a man who took kindly to being called a thief.

“But first maybe I’d better explain how I happened to own a two-masted sailing yacht in the first place, since I cared nothing at all about boats then. I was a widow, and not even a wealthy one—just a lonely one. I’d been married for a long time and very happily to a quiet and gentle man who was also one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers I’ve ever known. His name was Chris Osborne, and I suppose you’d say he was in the real-estate business, though real-estate speculation would be more like it. By the time he was forty-five he’d already made and lost several fortunes. I’d been his secretary before we were married, but even with that edge I don’t think I was ever sure at any given moment whether we were very well off or in debt. Not that it mattered a great deal. Without any children—” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the son who’d died. To a boy as young as Warriner it would mean very little anyway, and there had to be a limit somewhere to the coin you were willing to spend to get his attention. “Without any children to leave it to, I could never see any point in piling up money you didn’t need. We were happy, which was the thing that counted. Except that of course he was away a lot. I wasn’t much good at the social routine, because I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools could always make me feel awkward and put me on the defensive—I mean the ones who wanted to. So I had a business of my own, just for something to do when he was away, a small sports-car agency. But none of that’s important.

“Chris was killed three years ago. He’d gone out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch he was interested in, and the plane he was flying went out of control in a thunderstorm and crashed. I won’t burden you with what it’s like becoming a widow just by picking up the telephone, but it’s one of those things you get through some way, then and afterward. It took nearly two years to straighten out his business affairs. He was overextended again and pretty thinly financed on several deals he was working on, and there was a tax case pending with the Internal Revenue Service. There wasn’t a great deal left in the end, but I worked it out as well as I could. And it was something to do.

“But to get on to Dragoon. Chris didn’t care anything about boats either; he’d simply taken it in as part payment on some deal in Florida real estate, intending to sell it later. Then he was killed, and during the two years it took to get the estate settled and pay off the tax bill it lay at anchor in Key West with a watchman living aboard. Then, just as I started advertising it for sale, it was stolen. Some men got the old watchman drunk ashore and took it out of the harbor one night. The police called me in Houston, and I flew down there. They had only two leads to work on. One was that Dragoon’s dinghy had been picked up at sea by a fishing boat southeast of Miami near the Great Bahama Bank. The other was a suspect.

“It seemed a man had been aboard the yacht just a few days before, looking it over, and told the watchman he was interested in it. The watchman remembered his name, and the police picked him up at the hotel where he was staying in Miami and questioned him. They’d found out who he was, and were satisfied with his references—he’d been a charter yacht captain in the Bahamas for a long time, and had operated a shipyard in San Juan, Puerto Rico, until he’d got badly burned in an explosion and fire that destroyed most of it—but they weren’t satisfied with his story as to why he’d been interested in Dragoon.

“He said he’d been hired to take a look at it by a businessman staying at one of the big Miami Beach hotels, the president of some pharmaceutical firm, who wanted to buy a boat for company entertaining and asked him for a professional opinion of Dragoon before making me an offer subject to final survey. But when the police checked, the businessman turned out to be a phony. There was no such company, and the man himself had checked out of the hotel the same night Dragoon was stolen. So it was obvious he was one of the thieves. The only thing the police still weren’t sure of was whether this man was also one of the thieves or just another victim.

“So that’s when he came to see me at the hotel, just after he’d been questioned by the police, this hard-bitten and disagreeable man with the limp. His name was John Ingram, he said, and he was going to help me find my boat. I offered to pay him and was curtly brushed off. There would be no charge, he said. I was glad to have his help, but I still wasn’t any fonder of him. I could be stubborn too, and I didn’t like having favors tossed at me in that manner.

“But at the same time I began to have a very funny feeling about it. We’d find the boat. We’d find it if he had to sift the Atlantic Ocean with a tea-strainer. Maybe the thieves had made a mistake stealing it in the first place, but their really sad mistake was ever getting this man involved in it.

“He had an idea it was in trouble, probably out there somewhere near where the dinghy had been found, so we chartered a seaplane in Nassau to search the area from the air, and we finally located it aground on a sandbar on the edge of the Great Bahama Bank, about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Miami. The pilot landed us, with a rubber raft, and we went aboard. Two of the men who’d stolen it were still on it. They’d been trying to run a cargo of guns to one of the Central American countries, when they’d run up onto the Bank from poor navigation.

“John got the boat away from them, refloated it—without a towboat—threaded it through all those shoals and sandbars into deep water again, and sailed it back to Miami. I watched him do it; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But that isn’t what I started out to tell you, not just a story of watching an indomitable man do the impossible against a background I didn’t even know existed, nor even the fact that I got my boat back. Long before we reached Florida I didn’t care whether we ever did, and Dragoon had ceased to be important at all. I was just terrified he was going to sail it into Miami, tie it up, step off onto the dock, and say, ‘Now, Mrs. Osborne, there’s your goddamned boat,’ and turn around and walk away without even looking back. And if he did I knew I couldn’t stand it. It was as simple as that.

“I realize you can’t even become acquainted with somebody in five days, let alone fall in love with him. But it happened. Maybe it was the slow-motion effect of time and that increased sensitivity to everything you have in an unusual situation. Maybe it was from being with him every minute there in his own element, this world that was so strange and so utterly fascinating to me, as if I were actually seeing him for the first time. As I was. He wasn’t an arrogant and disagreeable man at all, but just a very proud one who felt he’d been made a fool of. And a very lonely one. He tried to hide it under all that armor of self-sufficiency, the way he fought the limp from those burns, but it was as clear to me as if he’d been carrying a sign.

“The same thing was happening to him, and he didn’t walk away when we got to Miami, but naturally it wasn’t as hasty and impulsive as all that, not with either of us. It took some time to clear myself of the suspicion of being some wealthy and socially prominent man-eater who was trying to buy him for a pet, and to convince him that I didn’t have any more money than he did. Then he pointed out that I’d seen him only in his own environment, and he’d look entirely different in mine—that is, living and working ashore. That wasn’t true, of course, but I knew he would be unhappy. But it was a dead issue anyway; there was nothing in my old life I wanted to go back to. I was as in love with this exciting new world of his just as much as he was, and I had a simpler approach to the subject of environment anyway. Mine was any place that included him. But then I warned you this was sentimental and probably corny.

“We were married six months later, after I’d wound up all the loose ends in Houston and sold everything I didn’t want to be burdened with any more. I sold Dragoon, which was too big for two people to handle, and we bought Saracen. Some day we expect we may go into the charter business in the Bahamas or West Indies, but that’s in the future. Now we’re on our honeymoon. We’re on our way to Tahiti. We realize it has jet runways now, but there are places beyond that don’t. We don’t know how long the cruise will last nor how far we’ll go. Maybe we’ll simply go broke. We don’t really care. I suppose you could call it a juvenile dream, or flight from responsibility, or refusal to accept the challenge, but everybody doesn’t have to listen to the same drum. I like ours. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, one night on a grounded schooner on the Great Bahama Bank, when I discovered what he was listening to and that I was in love with him. I’ve heard it ever since. I heard it this morning at dawn, becalmed a thousand miles from land, when he woke me winding a chronometer, and in a hundred other places and times and different kinds of weather, and always with him. If it ever stopped, or anything happened to him, I don’t think I’d want to go on living.” She paused and took a deep breath to steady the shaky feeling inside her. If she hadn’t reached him, she never would.

“Now, Hughie,” she went on quietly, “don’t you think it’s time we went back?”

His eyes had been on her face throughout with that same look of interest. Now he appeared to be caught off guard by this abrupt change of subject.

“Back?” he asked politely.

“Yes. To get John.”

“You mean back there?”

“Yes. We have to, Hughie. You realize that as well as I do—”

He shook his head. “Of course we can’t go back.”

She held on tightly. Don’t scream at him. Don’t lose your head. Some of it must have got through. “Hughie, please—” But how in God’s name could you keep repeating the obvious without the appearance of talking down, of explaining something to an idiot? How did you keep it on an intelligent level after you’d said it a dozen times? There simply wasn’t any way. “We have to go back now, Hughie. Now, before it’s too late.”

“No,” he said with a little shrug of annoyance. She could see him beginning to go away, as though she had disappointed him again with this revelation of selfishness in her character.

“Hughie, he’s my husband. I love him. Do you think I could go off and leave him on a sinking boat, to drown? You can’t, either; you know you can’t. You’re not capable of a thing like that. How could you justify it? You couldn’t live with yourself—”

“Do you always have to ruin everything by becoming hysterical? He won’t drown.”

“But that boat is sinking!”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“You said it was. You told us yourself.”

“I did?” It was obvious he didn’t believe it. He glanced into the binnacle, dismissing the whole thing as of no importance. “I don’t know why I would have said a thing like that.”

“Well, if it’s not sinking, why did you abandon it and come on here?”

“Why?” He looked up sharply. “Because they’re trying to kill me.”

She knew she was skirting the precipice now, but there was no way to avoid it. You couldn’t plead with him to go back without running into his reasons for not going. “Who’s trying to kill you?”

“Both of them.” His expression changed then, becoming one of triumphant slyness. “But I fooled them. They’ll never get me now, even with your husband helping them.”

There it was, she thought. They had come full circle and were back facing each other across the unbridgeable chasm. But at least he hadn’t become violent, and if she could stay here and go on talking maybe eventually she could get behind him. The marlinspike was cold and frightening against her flesh.

“Hughie,” she said soothingly, “nobody wants to kill you—”

“What?”

“I said nobody wants to hurt you.”

The craftiness in his eyes became more pronounced. “You mean I just imagined it?”

She saw the trap and tried to avoid it. “No, I mean it must be a mistake, a misunderstanding of some kind—”

“No! I know what you meant. You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”

“Of course I don’t, Hughie.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You’re just the same as they were. First your husband, and now you! Poor Hughie’s subject to hallucinations!” His voice slipped up into falsetto, apparently in imitation of someone, and was charged with an indescribable bitterness. “You just imagined it, Hughie, dear. Of course you did, darling.”

“Hughie! Stop that!” She tried to sound stern and forceful. Maybe she could shock him out of it.

His hands tightened on the wheel, and his eyes were on her with the beginnings of wildness in them. “And I thought I could trust you! I thought you were like Estelle!”

She could only stare in terror then. The name itself seemed to do something to him, to goad him beyond reason. Tendons stood out in his throat, and muscles writhed along his arms and shoulders as he tried to pull the wheel loose, or shake it. He cried out as though something were tearing inside him, and began to shout, leaning toward her across the wheel. She could feel the drops of spittle on her arm.

“They murdered her! They tried to kill us both! And you want to take me back there, don’t you, so they can finish the job? Oh, I know what you’re trying to do!” He half rose from the seat, as if to come out from behind the wheel.

Trying to stop him with the marlinspike would be suicide. She’d only hit him on an upraised arm, and then he’d take it away from her. If she ran, it would almost certainly trigger pursuit, and he could catch her before she could make it to the forward cabin. She did the only dung that was left. She sat still, forcing herself not even to draw back from him. For a second that seemed to go on forever it hung there, and then he dropped back to the seat again.

“They did it!” he shrieked. “They did it!” He was staring straight in front of him, and she sensed that he had forgotten her. His lips continued to move, but he made no further sound, and a muscle kicked spasmodically under one eye.

She never knew how afterward, but she forced herself to remain seated for another thirty seconds. Then she stood up slowly and with exaggerated casualness, on legs that trembled and had to be locked at the knees to support her. He paid no attention. She stepped back into the hatchway and started down, still clasping the marlinspike under her arm. At the bottom her legs quit on her at last, but she made it to one of the bunks before she collapsed. She turned then and looked back at the hatch. Sunlight fell into it unobstructed, sweeping back and forth across the ladder treads as Saracen rolled. The clatter of the engine went on, and above it she could either hear or feel the pounding of her heart.

It was the starboard bunk she was on—her own, where John came to her when they made love. Above it was the radiotelephone that was powerless to reach him, its very silence a cry for help. And under it in one of the drawers was the shotgun. She had remembered it too easily this time. Her mind slipped away from it with the same revulsion, but she could still see it. She pushed herself off the bunk and ran on into the forward cabin and bolted the door.

It was 11:10 a.m. She raised her eyes from the watch and swept them around the tiny V-shaped compartment that was no longer a sanctuary or a haven but a corner. It even looked like one.

11

There were two choices, and she had seven hours in which to make up her mind. But both choices were impossible, and nobody could endure this for seven hours.

What happened then?

She could foresee the answer, but she went over it again, just to be sure. Her mind was operating quite coldly at the moment, and she was calm; she was stronger than she’d thought. But then this was only the beginning, and the show hadn’t even started yet. She knew what was coming.

She could kill Warriner with the shotgun, or she could go off and leave John to drown. Since neither of these was even conceivable, she had the third, which wasn’t an alternative choice but merely a statement of fact or at least of probable truth. Nobody could endure this for seven hours. Her nerves would crack. Sometime between now and sunset her whole nervous system would go up in a puff of smoke like a short-circuited pinball machine; bells would ring, lights would flash, and she’d wind up lying on the bunk staring blankly at nothing while she picked at the fuzz on the blankets. In which case, alternative number two would win by default, and John would drown anyway.

Was that all?

No. There was still one other possibility. At the moment her nerves snapped she might run out and attack Warriner with the marlinspike or with her bare hands. The result of that was foregone.

Then she had to kill Warriner, and she had to do it before just thinking of it drove her out of her mind.

No. She sat down on one of the sailbags with her hands pressed against her temples. Nothing in life could ever be reduced to as simple terms as that. There had to be some other way out of the corner.

Well, where was it? Try them all again.

Hit him with something? He was suspicious of her now, and she couldn’t get behind him. And again you ran into the same old limiting factor; you’d get only one blow, and if that didn’t work you were dead, and so was John.

Try once more to reason with him? After what had just happened? You could carry on long conversations with him on any subject in the world, except one. At the mere mention of going back, he retreated into his madness and pulled up the bridge.

Well, maybe John wouldn’t drown; maybe Orpheus wasn’t sinking. That there was no way of proving definitely, one way or the other, but she had the evidence of her own eyes that there was water in the boat, lots of water. And why didn’t the radio work? Then she thought of something else. The engine didn’t work either, or John would have followed them. So everything below was flooded. Even if it weren’t in danger of sinking within the next few hours, John would never make port in it. Nobody could pump continuously for twenty days or more. Warriner said there were others aboard, but they hadn’t been on deck, and they would have been. So either they didn’t exist except in his madness, or they were hurt or already dead.

But at least she could try the radio again. She slid back the bolt and went out, carrying the marlinspike. If he started down the ladder she could throw it at his legs to be sure of getting back in time. She called and listened alternately on both the intership frequencies. There was no answer, no sound except the eternal crackling of the static. At the end of twenty minutes she knew she no longer had any hope of one, that she was only putting off the thing she had to face. She switched it off and went back. Very carefully and precisely she noted the heading on the compass and wrote it down on the scratch pad along with the time.

11:40 AM 226 degrees

It looked neat and businesslike. And there was the illusion she was doing something.

They hit her then from opposite sides, or rather she ran headlong into the second while she was recoiling from the first. The first, of course, was John. He was in the water, drowning, as the sun went down. She leaned forward with her face pressed against the scratch pad on her knees, her eyes tightly closed and then opened again because it was more clearly seen and more terrible with them closed. Then it was gone, as if an automatic projector were changing slides, and she saw the thing that would be there in the cockpit when the shotgun had done its work.

She’d never in her life shot anything with a gun of any kind, but her father and two older brothers had been hunters of quail, and inevitably she had seen a few examples of the mess that resulted when a bird was shot too close under the gun. She had no illusions as to what would be up there. She swallowed, fighting the nausea pushing up into her throat.

Seven hours?

Maybe she could merely frighten him with the gun, point it at him the way they did on television, and say, “All right, Hughie, turn around and go back.” This, she knew in her heart, was idiocy comparable to that other cliché of the private eyes and western marshals, the immaculate and neatly packaged death by gunshot wound that never hurt, either the shooter or the shot, but she gathered it to her for a moment in the desperation of her need for some other way out of the corner. Granted there didn’t seem to be much likelihood of scaring a man who was already insane from fear, you could at least examine it and try to figure out what would happen.

You had to assume two things, she thought. The first was that Hughie was capable of evaluating two different fears and making a conscious choice of the lesser. Could he? Probably, at least part of the time, but at any specific moment it would be as unpredictable as tossing a coin. The second was that a quaking matron with a gun would be more fearsome than the irrational horror that had already taken possession of his mind. No. Certainly not. The things in the darkness beyond the firelight were always more terrible than the ones that you could see. He’d either pay no attention to the gun at all, or at the mere mention of going back he’d go berserk and charge straight at her.

But it was still worth trying, wasn’t it? Even if there was only one chance in a thousand she could bluff him into going back and could control him all the way there without actually having to shoot, at least there would be that one. No. She saw the stupidity of it. Trying to bluff a man she couldn’t bluff, with a gun she hoped she wouldn’t have to use, was nothing short of suicide. In that second when she was still hysterically voicing threats and praying he would stop before she had to shoot, it would be too late to shoot, even if she could, and he’d have the gun away from her and he’d kill her. If she took it up that ladder at all and committed herself, it had to be with the hundred-per-cent certainty she was prepared to use it. And that she didn’t have.

Why not? It was Warriner, wasn’t it, who’d backed her into this corner from which there was no other exit?

Legally there was no question of her right to do so. There would be a hearing, somewhere and sometime, at which she would have to testify as to the circumstances, but that was all. She wouldn’t be charged with anything, and nobody would attach any blame to her. Then it was simply because of all those nights she’d wake up screaming, and the fact that until the day she died her mind would never emerge completely from the shadow of that unanswered question: could there have been some other way?

So in the end it boiled down to a simple act of purchase, didn’t it? If she had no illusions about the price or about the fact she would have to pay it, the terms were clear and understood. For John’s life she gave up her peace of mind for the rest of her own. Why not? People gave up their lives themselves for others, didn’t they? This was the opposite of heroic, and the act itself was abhorrent, but the same love was involved, the same willingness to pay.

She realized then there was no sense to any of these arguments. You couldn’t rationalize killing a man with a shotgun, and you didn’t arrive at the deed by any process of thought, of weighing the advantages and disadvantages. If you did it at all, it was after you’d quit thinking, in desperation, when nothing else was left.

And, anyway, she probably couldn’t even assemble the gun. John had never done it since it had been aboard, and it had been nearly twenty years since she’d seen her father do it. And it could be a different kind, or a later model. Guns must change over the years, the way cars did, didn’t they? Of course they did.

But there were only two pieces.

No, it was just her impression there were only two pieces. There might be more. She’d never counted them, had she?

Well, if she found out she couldn’t assemble it, that would settle it, and the torture would stop.

Then, without even knowing how she’d got there, she was kneeling beside the bunk in the after cabin, pulling out the drawer. There were only two rolls of the fleece, one long one and another shorter and bulkier. She ran back into the forward cabin with them and bolted the door. She put them on the bunk and began untying the cords that bound them.

There were three pieces.

The long roll contained only the barrels, the twin dark tubes fixed side by side, but the other held two pieces. One was the part that went against your shoulder—the stock, she thought it was called—with the lever for breaking it open to put in the shells, and the trigger guard and the triggers. The other piece was a hand-grip sort of thing she seemed to remember went under the barrels just in front of the stock. It was mostly of wood, rounded on the sides and bottom, tapering at one end and fitted with a concave piece of steel at the other. She had no idea how it was supposed to be attached to the barrels.

The barrels themselves had a projection at one end, on the bottom, that must fit into something in the metal part at the front end of the stock. She took them in one hand and the stock in the other and began trying to match them. Yes, there it was. They went together, and formed a hinge. She swung the barrels up, and they locked in place.

But there was still the third part. And it was obvious it was the wrong piece for this kind of gun, or that something was missing. It was supposed to go under the barrels, right there, and there was nothing to hold it. The concave end must go against the rounded metal end there at the front of the stock. And you could see it didn’t even fit; it still stuck out at a slight angle. Well, John must have ordered another one to be shipped to them in Papeete. And since the gun couldn’t be assembled without the right piece— There was a little click, and she gasped. The fore end had snapped up into place against the spring tension that held it there.

She stared at it in horror. It was a complete shotgun. It was all there, and it was assembled.

* * *

For the third time in ten minutes Lillian Warriner saw Ingram glance off to the northeast where the squall flickered and rumbled along the rim of the world. She could see no appreciable difference in the squall itself. It was still the same swollen mass of purple, shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing its skirts of rain, seemingly no larger or nearer than it had been a quarter of an hour ago—but it was Ingram himself she was watching. She judged by the simple fact that he kept looking at it that he was worried about it, though he said nothing. He continued to bail, the gray eyes expressionless.

Well, it wasn’t likely he’d be running in circles and wringing his hands. And there was nothing they could do about the squall anyway, except get the sail off, and probably he’d send her to wake Bellew. No doubt there was some quixotic male convention against allowing the porcine bastard to drown in his sleep.

She liked Ingram and was conscious of increasing admiration for him, though this of course only added to the burden of her guilt, while at the same time evoking a mild sort of wonder at her willingness to credit her appraisal of anybody any more after having been so conspicuously wrong about Bellew. No, it wasn’t so much that she’d been wrong as that she’d simply had no way of knowing how small even a large yacht could become after a few days at sea. Human beings confined in too small an area were apparently subject to the same laws regarding molecular friction and the generation of heat as gases under compression.

So now not only had they managed to blow themselves up, but the spreading shock wave of disaster had engulfed two other people whose only crime had been the fact they were in the same part of the ocean. The guilt was still hers, and she accepted it, though it seemed a terrible price to pay for the pursuit of an impossible dream, a few minutes of arrant and unforgivable bitchiness, and an accident. There were beckoning avenues of escape: the accident couldn’t have been her fault because she’d been asleep at the time, and she’d been goaded into the bitchiness, but these were sleazy evasions and technicalities for which she had nothing but contempt. They were the type of thing that Hughie— She stopped.

Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work, that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the warnings of her mind.

If only, she thought now in her own contained and private agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them; she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She wondered what crimes the human race could have found to commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom, religion, and love.

She glanced up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”

“I can’t tell yet what it’s going to do,” he replied. “But there’s no use letting the sails slat any longer.”

“Do you want me to help?”

“No. Better keep pumping. Or just rest for a few minutes.”

She was conscious of numbness in her arms and shoulders, but she shook her head. “No. I’m all right.” She bent to the pump again.

If only she’d left him alone…

* * *

The main and mizzen were tightly furled. Ingram finished lashing the genoa rolled up along the lifeline and looked at his watch. It was 3:50 p.m. The sun, though lower in the west, still beat on them with sullen weight in the sticky and unmoving air that felt as if you were trying to breathe in a vacuum. The day was a squall-breeder if he’d ever seen one. There was no sound except water going overboard from the pump and those other and inexorably increasing tons of it sloshing back and forth inside the hull as Orpheus lurched over on the swell. The whole northeast sky was black now, but then squalls always looked worse when they were opposite the sun. There was still a chance it would pass to the northward of them, and he didn’t want to call Bellew. Not yet. Let him get all the sleep he could. There was a long night ahead of them—if they were still afloat.

He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs. Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.

He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs. Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it. There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the deckhouse.

“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”

She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”

“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”

She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant and insufferable bitch.”

Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”

She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible. But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being, you at least owed him an explanation.

“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly. “I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it has to work both ways.”

“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”

“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t heard the story.”

“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”

“Because he thinks that’s the way we tried to kill him, by drowning—”

He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.

She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”

“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with water.”

“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward the sea around them. “When you look out there you see nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown within a few feet of the surface. But you’re in the water; I think he imagines himself rather precariously suspended on the surface of it, as if it were a film of some kind, ten thousand feet above the bottom. In other words, I get the impression he sees it all the way down. Hence, acrophobia. As I say, I’m only guessing, but how else can you account for that horror when he sees something sinking below him? To him, it’s not sinking; it’s falling. And, like all people with acrophobia, he imagines himself falling with it.”

Ingram nodded, though still not convinced she was right. “But he wasn’t always like that?”

“Oh, no. He was an excellent swimmer. And skin-diver. It’s simply because of what we did to him ten days ago. But you have to understand what happened before, and what the situation was. Explosive is a good one-word description. To begin with, not one of us was competent to take a yacht across the Pacific, and incompetence multiplied by any number up to infinity is still incompetence. Four people who don’t know what they’re doing—”

“Are simply four times worse than one,” Ingram said. “So nobody was in charge?”

“No. Not after things started to fall apart. Hughie, as legal owner of the yacht and the only one with any sailing experience at all, should have been in command, but you can’t force a man to command, to fight back, to accept responsibility, if the only responsibility he’s ever had in his life was to be acceptable and pleasing to a succession of overprotective women who took care of him. And if you happen to be in love with him and have to stand there helplessly day after day and watch this disintegration under pressure, this thing you can’t do anything about, eventually your own frustration may goad you into doing something stupid and cruel and unforgivable. But I didn’t intend to make excuses, and I’m getting ahead of the story anyway.”

12

“Hughie,” she went on, “has always been obsessed by a feeling for the greatness of Gauguin, and it’s been a lifelong ambition of his to go to Polynesia and live among the islands as he did, escape from the rat race the same way, paint the same subjects, experience the same things. So, when we were married in Europe almost a year ago, I let myself be persuaded, in spite of the fact I had some misgivings about it. In the first place, there’s no escape from our so-called civilization any more; the twentieth century is something we’re locked into and there’s no way we can get out; when we got to Papeete we’d probably find the same jukeboxes, the same headlines, the same cocktail parties, the same jet service from here to there, the same Bomb, and the same exhortations to embrace the finer life by buying something. And in the second place, I was more than a little doubtful of our ability to sail a boat down there. But at heart I wanted to be persuaded, and I was. From my point of view there were several things in favor of it. No doubt you can guess what some of them were, but in the interests of clarity they might as well be included in this confession. I’m considerably older than Hughie, and when I met him I was a widow, a fairly wealthy one. You know what he looks like. The picture is trite to the point of banality, except that in this case it’s not true at all. He’s no glorified beach-boy, and we were genuinely in love with each other. And while I bleed very little over the opinions of other people, I didn’t want him regarded as something he wasn’t—at least, not yet, by the grace of God. I have a small but very good collection of paintings, and I know the work of talent when I see it. I wanted to help him, and in Hughie’s case one way of helping him—and me—was to keep him out of the reach of all that gaggle of soi-disant benefactresses and panting patrons of the arts who couldn’t keep their hands off him.”

She broke off with an impatient gesture and then went on. “But enough of that. Hughie bought and studied all the books he could find on yachting and navigation. We chartered a yacht, with a professional crew of two, for a cruise in the western Mediterranean, from Cannes down to the Balearics, to learn as much as we could from practical experience. We came back to the States last winter, bought Orpheus, and began getting ready.”

She smiled musingly. “Then I think we were betrayed. No doubt you remember the old ploy of crooked gamblers, letting the sheep, the intended victim, win the first few hands in order to increase the stakes. It was as if the Pacific Ocean, or fate, did it deliberately. The passage from Santa Barbara down to La Paz was ridiculously easy. Nothing went wrong at all. The weather was perfect, Hughie’s navigation was seemingly accurate enough, the couple with us, who were old friends of mine from San Francisco, were congenial, and we were never at sea long enough for the confinement and too close association to cause any friction, because we made stops at San Diego and Ensenada. If anything had gone wrong in that first leg of the trip we would have been brought face to face with our own inexperience and incompetence, and we’d have had sense enough to give it up. But nothing did, and we were far too overconfident and cocky by the time we reached La Paz.

“Then the other couple had to abandon the trip there and go back to San Francisco because of illness. We lay at anchor in the harbor for nearly three months.”

“Were you living aboard all the time?” Ingram asked.

“No. We came back to California, by plane, for several weeks, and part of the time we lived ashore at a hotel. Why?”

“I think that’s when the dry rot began to run wild. Orpheus may have still been sound enough to make it to Papeete when you left Santa Barbara, but after three months of lying there in La Paz, probably with no ventilation below, she was eaten up with it by the time you sailed.”

She nodded. “At any rate, we were stranded. Orpheus was too large for two people to handle, even if we’d dared attempt it alone. None of my friends who would have liked to go could get away. We wrote to the yacht broker who’d sold us the boat, and he managed to locate a professional willing to make the trip, a man named Grover or Glover, who turned out to be utterly impossible. He arrived on the plane from Tijuana dead drunk, and somehow managed to stay that way the five days he was in La Paz, without, as far as we could discover, ever taking a drink. And while it might have been interesting from a medical point of view to see if he could stay bagged all the way across the Pacific with no visible intake of alcohol, as a yacht captain he was hopeless. We paid him off and decanted him into the Tijuana plane. So we were on the point of selling Orpheus and flying to Papeete to buy another boat there where we could hire an Island crew, when we met the Bellews at the little hotel ashore. Bellew was gathering material for an article on big-game fishing in the Gulf of California, and we became quite friendly in the two weeks they were there. We asked them to make the trip with us.”

It was a tragic mistake, but one that had been very easy to make. It was banal to say that Bellew had seemed different ashore, but in the end that was what it amounted to. She supposed they all had, for that matter. Bellew was a man it was easy to get along with sitting around a cafe table sipping tall iced drinks in a backwater fishing port as limited in other diversions and other friends as La Paz. He’d led an intense and active outdoor life and had a great fund of entertaining stories which he told exceedingly well and with only a little suggestion of boasting. He played the guitar and sang folk songs in the manner of Burl Ives, and he and Hughie, who also sang very well, had two or three times put on highly successful impromptu shows for the other patrons of the hotel. He was big and outgoing and, if a little loud at times, not offensively so, and there was a male competence and assurance about him she’d instinctively trusted because they somehow reminded her of her first husband. It would take more trying circumstances than sitting in cafes or fishing for marlin with him to bring up the other side of the coin, the cruelty and the contempt for any kind of weakness.

Perhaps, on the other hand, Bellew could feel with some justification that he’d been fooled too. He’d claimed no experience with the sea except that highly specialized business of big-game fishing, in power cruisers and usually very near to land, while Hughie, emboldened by the complete success of the trip down the coast from Santa Barbara, had perhaps sounded a little too salty and seagoing, sitting around the drinks.

And she’d liked Estelle Bellew—at least at first. Estelle was a rather shy and only moderately attractive woman of around forty, who was completely wrapped up in her photography and had no apparent designs on Hughie. This turned out to be another mistake, of course. While she didn’t have any amatory interest in him—then or later—she did have a great reservoir of unexpended gentleness and compassion she’d never had any occasion to use, living with this hairy and domineering bastard she was married to, and she was possessed of an equally frustrated mother instinct that Hughie brought out in full, especially after it became apparent how badly Hughie needed a mother or somebody to protect him from the Pacific Ocean and from Bellew’s abrasive contempt.

“Why did he want to make the trip?” Ingram asked. “Bellew, I mean.”

“I don’t even know who first suggested it,” she replied. “It was just one of those ideas that can burst on the scene fully grown when four people are sitting in a bar with their second or third round of drinks. It was about ten days after we’d met them, and we’d just come in from a day’s fishing as his guests on the boat he’d chartered. He already had all the material for the story he was doing on the fishing at La Paz and was sure he could get a story, or perhaps two, out of the trip. I told him we would be glad to pay their air transportation back from Papeete. And, after all, it would only take a month.” She smiled bitterly. “We sailed from La Paz twenty-six days ago.”

Before they were more than a week out, everything began to go wrong. They blew out a sail in a squall and lost another overboard. Leaks began to show up from opened deck seams so that when they were shipping any water aboard everything below was soaked. They missed Clipperton Island because something had apparently slipped up in Hughie’s navigation. They used up most of their fuel trying to beat their way back to it, which was ridiculous, since it was uninhabited anyway, but by now they were no longer acting rationally but only motivated by their endless quarrels. They gave up trying to find the island after it failed a second and a third time to appear where Hughie said it was. Orpheus began to leak alarmingly, so it took more pumping every day to keep the water out of the cabins.

But beyond all that, it was the old story of clashing personalities jammed into too small a space with nowhere to go to avoid each other. Bellew became caustic, loud-mouthed, and finally insufferable, openly contemptuous of Hughie’s mistakes in navigation and seamanship, while Hughie, instead of fighting back, retreated into sullenness and pouting. Estelle Bellew was sympathetic and tried to shield him from her husband. Lillian herself lashed out at Bellew in defense of Hughie—or she did at first, until she decided that wasn’t the answer—but at the same time it was lacerating to have to admit to herself that he even needed defending against another man. Some of her hurt and resentment must have showed, for Hughie began turning increasingly to Estelle rather than to her for comfort when he backed down from Bellew. And Estelle tried increasingly to help him, as though he were a boy, and alone.

“That in itself was infuriating,” she went on. “The implication was that I was some species of heartless monster who had no sympathy, no feeling for him at all. She had the best intentions in the world, but she simply couldn’t seem to understand that that was the trouble in the first place, that he’d never in his life had to accept the responsibility for his own actions or fight for his rights, because there was always some woman panting to shield him from the one and buy him the other. And she was simply doing it again. I was trying to help him in the only way he could be helped—or that I hoped he could be helped—by letting him work it out for himself, no matter how I cringed and wanted to go somewhere and cry when he simply retreated into petulance in the face of Bellew’s contempt, or no matter how much easier it would have been to set him behind me and then remove Bellew’s skin in strips. So I began to treat her—Estelle—with the same insufferable nastiness that Bellew treated Hughie.

“In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer—the helplessness of it, I mean—watching Hughie being browbeaten without the spirit to fight back, and not being able to do anything in the world about it except drive him more and more to some other woman for sympathy. I hated both of them, and I hated myself. I blew up. I did the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt everybody. I made an open, deliberate pass at Bellew.”

“Well, it’s been done before,” Ingram said.

“But seldom by people who are assumed to be adult. And seldom with consequences as tragic. It happened one night just at the end of the second week.”

It was shortly after dinner and they were all on deck. She was at the wheel, having relieved Hughie just at dusk so he could take a series of star sights while he could still see the horizon. Bellew was sprawled in the cockpit beyond her, while Estelle was sitting alone on the forward end of the deckhouse, looking at the fading afterglow of sunset. Hughie’s star sights didn’t work out. He’d got three of them, with three lines of position several hundred miles apart, none of which crossed, or were anywhere near the dead-reckoning position based on the equally dubious fix he’d got at noon. Either his figures were wrong or he’d mistaken his stars. A long time went by while he checked and rechecked his work. Then he came out on deck with a star chart, but in the meantime the moon had risen and the stars were fading and hard to distinguish. And Bellew started on him again. Her flesh crawled.

“How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same ocean?”

Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic salaud and tell him to shut up?

“I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend runs a bar there…”

She closed her eyes. Do something, Hughie!

He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like help with some of your problems, why don’t you bring up a couple of drinks?”

The others had seen, all right—at least the merged silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad, at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard. She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up, leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently he’d slept on deck.

She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation. We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it was only an accident.

“I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit, keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went out.

“He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.

Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was looking down into the water when he saw the school of dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you understand, and not porpoises.”

Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water. The Mexicans call them dorado—golden, or gilded. They like to lie under anything floating on the surface.”

“They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could photograph them from below the surface if the school was ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them, so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck. Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course. Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was asleep.

“Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”

Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a ballet, where every movement had to fit.

She went on. “In another minute or two Estelle came on deck from the forward hatch, the one leading up directly from their cabin. She had on her swim suit and was carrying a snorkel and mask and an underwater camera. That is, it wasn’t really an underwater camera with a housing, but one of her thirty-five-millimeter cameras that she’d made a watertight bag for with some kind of clear plastic and carried slung around her neck on a cord. Hughie put the ladder over just forward of amidships, and they eased down it into the water—not jumping or diving in because they didn’t want to frighten the dolphin.

“It was a rule, of course, since all of us did swim when we had the chance, that nobody should ever go in the water without notifying whoever was on watch. But Hughie apparently thought, since Bellew was gone from the deck, that he was forward in his own cabin and that Estelle had told him before she came up. And Estelle, since Hughie had been the one who’d brought up the whole thing, must have assumed that Hughie had notified him. She hadn’t even seen Bellew, because he was in the main cabin. So they put on their masks and snorkels and began trying to get close to the school of fish, which was now moving away from the boat. There was a moderate groundswell running, so even when Bellew came back on deck he probably wouldn’t have seen them unless he’d happened to be looking in their direction at the moment they rose to the top or the near side of a swell.

“Hughie has never been completely rational since, and when I saw him again, six hours later he was raving and incoherent, but as well as I could piece it together they’d been in the water about ten minutes and were not over a hundred yards from the boat when it happened. They were fairly close to the dolphin and they’d both dived, Hughie just looking at them while Estelle tried to snap a picture. Hughie came up first, and when his head was above water he was aware that something had changed. It was a second or two before he realized what it was. A breeze was blowing across his face. He turned and looked toward Orpheus and screamed. But Bellew didn’t hear him.

“As I said, this was at two p.m. I awoke a little after three-thirty and could tell from the angle of heel and the lessened rolling that we’d picked up a breeze while I was asleep and were under way. I noticed Hughie wasn’t in his bunk, but paid no attention to it. In a few minutes I got up, dressed, washed my face, and went up through the deckhouse to the main cabin to brew a cup of tea. It was ten minutes of four when I carried it out on deck. Bellew was at the wheel, of course. We were on the starboard tack and probably making around two knots in a breeze that didn’t much more than fill the sails.

“Bellew merely grunted when I sat down in the cockpit, but in a minute he said, ‘Did you call the great Magellan? Or are you going to take his watch?’

“That was the first second it dawned on me I hadn’t seen him anywhere. I jumped up, spilling the tea, and ran below, and I was all the way down in the main cabin before I realized that if he had gone to that woman’s cabin, if he’d been silly enough to go in there with her husband on deck, I’d already given it away and Bellew would probably beat him to death. I spoke outside the curtain. There was no answer, so I pulled it back. The cabin was empty. I pounded on the door of the washroom and opened it. There was no one in it, nor in the one aft.”

She was whimpering and numb with terror by the time she made it back to the deck and saw the ladder hanging over the side. Bellew already had the wheel hard over, and Orpheus was coming ponderously about.

She had got her voice back at last and was shrieking at him as she set up the weather runner and trimmed the jib sheet. “When? How long ago? You blind, stupid, forgetful fool, you’ve killed them!”

”Shut up!” Bellew ordered curtly. “They didn’t tell me.”

“Well, you must have seen them! You were supposed to be on deck!” She broke off then, realizing at last that they were wasting precious seconds on this idiocy when there was so much to be done. They had to figure out the reciprocal of the course he’d been making and estimate the distance they’d come since the breeze sprang up. And none of it was easy. The wind had been erratic, and he’d had to tack twice when it headed him. Their speed had varied from an estimated less than one knot to an estimated three and a half. None of it had been written down because he’d intended to write a rough average of it in the log when he was relieved. She took the wheel, heading back in the approximate direction, while he struggled with the figures. In around ten minutes he had it calculated as closely as they ever would—somewhere to the east-northeast, four to five miles.

She began to hope again. It was only two hours, and they were both good swimmers. Hughie, she knew, could stay afloat four hours easily, and they would have been swimming this way—no, he couldn’t even see the masts at this distance, not down in the water. But for at least half the time he would have been able to see them, anyway each time he came to the top of a swell. It was still three hours and more till dark, and she’d get Bellew to hoist her to the top of the mainmast in a bosun’s chair. They’d get there in time. Then the breeze began to falter. It came on again for three or four minutes, dropped once more, and then died completely.

They couldn’t run the engine. They’d already used up all the fuel. They lay helplessly in the trough and rolled.

They launched the dinghy. Bellew wanted to go because he could row faster, but she insisted. She was two hundred yards away before she realized she didn’t have the faintest idea which direction she was going in. She came back and got a compass and set it between her feet, even though she knew it was hopeless looking for them in the dinghy. She was too low in the water to see anything or to be seen. She was far out from Orpheus when the sun went down and it began to grow dark. She stood up in the dinghy, calling his name until she could no longer see anything but the distant gleam of the masthead light Bellew had turned on. She rowed back and went aboard. She lay in the cabin in the darkness, trying not to think of what it must have been like to see the boat sailing away from him a thousand miles from land. Bellew came in and tried to speak to her. She didn’t even know what he said. He went away, into the forward cabin.

About half an hour later she heard him run through the deckhouse on the way to the deck, shouting, “I heard something.” She ran up. The spreader lights were on, as well as the masthead light, but they were glowing only faintly, scarcely brighter than candles, because the batteries were discharged. She ran back into the deckhouse for a flashlight. She began throwing its beam out across the water. Then she heard the sound too, a faint whimpering, but it was coming from aboard rather than from the water. She threw the light forward.

Hughie had come up the ladder and was lying at the foot of the mainmast, his arms locked around it, his face pressed against the wood. His shoulders shook, and he was still making that not quite human sound deep in his throat. She noticed, in that way you sometimes fix your attention on details in moments of overwhelming emotion, that there was a gaping and bluish cut, no longer bleeding, across the knuckles of his right hand. He was alone. Estelle hadn’t come back.

“As weak as he was after six hours in the water,” she went on, “it took both of us to pry his arms loose from the mast. We half led and half carried him below and put him on his bunk. He opened his eyes; at first they were completely blank, and then he began to recognize us. He cringed back and jumped off the bunk and cowered back in a corner, screaming at us. He was almost incoherent, but we could understand bits of what he was saying. We’d tried to kill him. We’d gone off and left him deliberately. I was only pretending to be asleep and knew he’d gone into the water. And there was something about a shark, over and over.

“In the end, Bellew had to hold him while I injected a sedative dose of morphine in his arm. He fought us, and when he felt the prick of the needle he screamed.

“He never let either of us come near him again. He slept, if he ever slept at all, in the sail locker up forward, with the door barricaded inside. He looked rational, at least most of the time, but he was silent and withdrawn. He would never approach the rail without that look of horror on his face and a death grip on something solid, like a man with acrophobia frozen to a girder a thousand feet above the street. When we’d try to question him about Estelle, he’d go all to pieces and begin shouting again about a shark. I made Bellew stop asking him.

It was three days before I got a more or less coherent story of what had happened.

“They’d been attacked by a shark. He still had his mask on, and he swam down and hit it on the snout with his fist, trying to drive it away. That was the way he got that wound on his hand. It had avoided him because he was under the water, but had come up and gone for Estelle, who was threshing on the surface. It cut her in two. There was nothing he could do. He swam out of the bloody water and got away, but the sight of it was too much—that and the fear, and the belief we’d done it deliberately. He cracked up.”

So Bellew was right, Ingram thought. He was on the point of asking if she believed the story herself, but realized the futility of it. If she did believe it, it was only because she refused to accept the truth. She, better than any of them, should know what Hughie was really running from, but if she had already made the choice and was determined to accept the blame, argument was useless, and there were more urgent things to think about at the moment. No doubt a psychiatrist could dig it out of her and force her to acknowledge it, but he wasn’t a psychiatrist, they were on a sinking boat in mid-ocean, and nine-tenths of his mind was occupied with the cold and relentless struggle to keep the thought of Rae from swamping it. And, in the end, perhaps the specific act for which she blamed herself wasn’t significant anyway. The guilt she accepted was the blanket indictment of having been the link at which the lengthening chain of Hughie-protection had finally snapped. She’d been minding the baby when it crawled into the goldfish pond and drowned.

It was possible, of course, that Hughie did think—or had managed to convince himself—that they’d deliberately gone off and left the two of them to die. And naturally he might have an irrational fear of water, after having been in it for six hours in mid-ocean, part of the time in the dark and thinking of the bottom ten thousand feet below him. But neither of these was the horror he was trying to escape, the thing he saw when something was sinking in the water below him. That was Estelle. The only part of it that was difficult to understand was what sick compulsion had kept him there, looking down through the mask at her body falling into the depths after he had killed her.

He’d seen the wound on Hughie’s hand. And it wasn’t an abrasion such as he’d have received from striking the sand-papery skin of a shark. It was a cut. It had been caused by human teeth, or the broken glass of a diving mask.

So Estelle had panicked and tried to climb up on him to get out of the water, the way the drowning often did. He’d beaten her off with his fists and knocked her out. And the ironic part of it was that, for anybody willing to accept at least a portion of the blame, there’d still have been a way out. Subduing the panicky person who was threatening to drown both himself and his rescuer was an accepted part of lifesaving. Somebody else might have convinced himself he’d hit her only to try to save her, so he could turn her on her back and tow her, and then she’d slipped away from him and drowned before he could get her back to the surface. But not Hughie, who couldn’t accept any of the penalty for anything. He’d had to invent his nonexistent shark, which even he couldn’t believe. But he had to believe it, and go on believing it, or face an unpleasant fact for the first time in his life. And, for a beginner, he’d been handed a rough one to face.

She must have still had the camera slung around her neck. Those 35 mm. jobs were heavy for their size, and with none of the built-in buoyancy from a standard underwater housing it must have been just enough to tip the scales beyond that state of near equilibrium of a woman’s body in salt water—any woman except the very thin and muscular and heavy-boned—and keep her falling straight below him after she was unconscious. Even then, the rate of descent was probably very slow, at least until she was down to where the pressure began collapsing her chest cavity. And Hughie had watched her.

No, he thought then, not necessarily. Maybe he’d only imagined watching her; maybe it had already begun in his mind. At any rate, there was the horror, and there was the beginning of that awareness of depth, or of height, upon which he was impaled—seeing the body of this friend, this woman who’d been so good to him and whom he’d killed in panic to save his own life, slide into the ever-deepening abyss below him, still clearly visible at fifty feet, a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, and after she had dwindled and disappeared entirely he could go on imagining it—a thousand feet, five thousand, ten thousand, and still falling.

Jesus, he thought, I’m glad I’m carrying it around looking for a place to set it down.

He was aware then that Orpheus’s motion was changing. The groundswell was becoming confused as it encountered the mounting seas built up in the squall. He glanced out toward the dark turbulence of the sky in the northeast and the advancing wall of rain that was probably less than two miles away.

“Maybe you’d better call Bellew,” he said.

13

Without any remembrance at all of how she’d got there she was standing on the companion ladder, looking out into blazing sunlight and the encircling blue of the sea. Ten feet in front of her the golden impervious head was poised above the binnacle, and she could hear herself shrieking through the clatter of the engine.

“Go back! For the love of God, go back before something awful happens! Don’t make it happen, don’t make it, please don’t make it!” Her voice skidded up over the rim into hysteria and incoherence.

There was no reply. He glanced at her briefly and then back at the compass with something of the studied avoidance of a diner looking the other way after a waiter has dropped a tray of food, as though he was as disappointed in this uncouth screeching as he had been in her selfishness. Then, with no clear idea how she’d got there either, she was back in the forward cabin, holding onto the upright pipe of the bunk frame with one hand while she ran the fingers of the other across the side of her face and upward into her hair. Something was quivering, either her face or the hand, but she wasn’t sure which, any more than she was sure whether she’d actually gone out there and screamed the warning at him or whether she’d just imagined it. No, she must have gone out, because the door was unlatched and open. She could hear it banging behind her as Saracen rolled.

The shotgun still lay on the bunk where she’d dropped it, the three separate, improbable pieces suddenly united and frozen into this unmistakable shape of deadliness. She jerked her eyes away from it and looked at her watch, and then a second time in disbelief. It was 12:45 p. m. Time was hurtling past her, and she was beginning to lose whole intervals of it. They were already twenty miles from that sinking boat, and by sunset, when they’d be over fifty, she would have cracked completely. Her chin still quivering, she looked around the tiny compartment again, seeing for the twentieth time only the walls of the trap, this comer she’d been backed into and from which there was no escape except one. She’d tried everything else, and it was hopeless. He was impregnable, unreachable.

Then, with the suddenness of a thrown switch, the wildness and despair were gone, and she was strangely calm. It was as if her mind had come into focus at last, with everything else dropping away until there remained only the two simple, elemental facts she’d been groping for all the time, the only two that mattered at all. John was going to die unless she saved him. And she had the means to do it.

At first she thought the engine had stopped, it had grown so quiet. But when she listened, she could still hear it; it was just farther away, and there was a faint rushing or ringing sound inside her head, as if she had been taking quinine. It was like being enclosed in some huge bubble that protected her from all extraneous sound or thought or interference. It was cold inside the bubble, and there didn’t seem to be enough air, because her breathing was rapid and very shallow, but she was invulnerable to everything beyond. She went over and picked up the shotgun.

And this was strange too, with some feeling that she’d done it before and knew exactly what she had to do. It was as if, while her conscious mind was recoiling from it in revulsion, some far level of the unconscious had already accepted the gun with complete fatalism and calmly planned its use. She had to learn how it worked. She pointed it away from her and tried to pull the triggers. Nothing happened. But she’d expected that. Guns had safety mechanisms of some kind so they couldn’t be fired accidentally. She began searching for the key to it, and found it immediately, since it was the only part of the weapon not already identified. It had to be this small oblong button just back of the lever that broke it open at the breech so you could put in the shells. She tried to push the button down, but nothing happened. Then it must slide. She pushed it forward, and it did, perhaps a quarter of an inch. She pulled the triggers and heard the clicks, one after the other, as hammers fell on the firing pins.

The shells. Still inviolate within her bubble of cold and unswerving concentration, she went out into the after cabin and knelt before the drawer. There were two boxes of them. Both had been wrapped in plastic and then covered with two or three coats of varnish to protect them from the humidity of the tropics. She’d need a knife. She was making a note of this and reaching over the medicine kit for one of the boxes of shells, when she paused. It was only for a minor part of a second, a fleeting but inexplicable hiatus of movement that was noticeable at all only because ever since she’d accepted this thing and committed herself she’d been going forward with the inevitability of some machine running downhill on rails.

Poised there on the dead center of this almost imperceptible hesitation, with the feeling that somebody was pounding on the wall of the bubble, trying to get in or to attract her attention, she looked down into the drawer, wondering what had caused it. Besides some heavy clothing they wouldn’t need until they got down into the higher latitudes, it held only those articles which, in addition to the shotgun, had to be sealed in port by customs—the shells; her cigarettes; John’s cigars; the medicine kit, because of the narcotics it contained; and several bottles of whisky and two or three of rum. Then the feeling was gone. The protective concentration closed in around her again, and she was moving ahead. She gathered up the box of shells, picked up a small paring knife from a galley drawer, and hurried back.

It took several minutes to hack her way into the box. She extracted two of the shells and set the box on the deck under the bunk. She broke the gun at the breech with the lever, dropped them in, and closed it. She was fortunate in that her very lack of familiarity with guns spared her the deadly association of those three sounds linked in sequence—the toinnnk, toinnnk, of the shells dropping into the ends of the tubular air columns of the barrels, and the metallic click as the breech closed and locked.

But she wasn’t so lucky with the blanket. Strangely, the blanket was worse now than the gun, and it might have stopped her except for the furious intensity of her concentration and the momentum she had already gathered. Because she knew what she had to do with it, and do immediately and without hesitation or thought; if she waited, she might never go up there at all, and the act would have been for nothing.

She set the gun down on one of the sailbags, peeled the blanket from the bunk, and held it up before her by the corners with her face averted, like a fireman approaching a blaze behind a shield. The ocean of sickness beyond the bubble surged inward and threatened to collapse it, but she looked down at her feet, her mind shored up against everything but the problem, and decided she could get up the ladder this way and across the cockpit.

She retrieved the gun, took the blanket in her other arm, and went out. The roaring in her head was louder now, so she could scarcely hear the engine. She was cold all over and wasn’t sure she was breathing at all; there seemed to be some tremendous weight pressing on her chest. She walked with a stiff-legged artificial gait, like a mechanical toy, fighting the rubbery weakness of her knees, but she was still going forward, still protected and invulnerable. She could see nothing on either side of her. Straight ahead, as if at the end of a long tunnel, the bright oblong patch of sunlight fell through the open hatch, sweeping back and forth across the ladder as Saracen rolled. She reached it. She stepped up on the first tread of the ladder and peered out.

She could just see over the hatch coaming, and only his face was visible as he sat in the after end of the cockpit behind the wheel. He was looking down into the compass, and his lips were moving, apparently without sound, though she didn’t know for sure because of the engine noise and that roaring in her ears. He glanced up then, straight into her eyes, but there was no recognition, no indication he even saw her. He looked back at the compass, his lips continuing to move. Somewhere inside her a voice was screaming: Now, now!

She dropped the blanket beside her on the ladder and brought up the gun, pushing the safety button forward. The barrels reached up and out, resting on the coaming in front of her, and when she put her shoulder against the stock and sighted along them they were pointing just slightly to one side of his face. She moved them over, and when she closed her left eye they were lined up, foreshortened and centered on his forehead ten feet in front of her. She could no longer breathe at all. Her right index finger, like some great unwieldy sausage, came in against the gun, felt the forward edge of the trigger guard, slipped back around it, inside, and lay against the trigger. All she had to do was pull. She tried.

She closed both eyes and let her head fall forward, wanting help from somewhere, but there was no help; she was alone, and if it was to be done she had to do it. When she opened her eyes and looked along the barrels again, the beautiful, hated, mad, impervious head was still there on the ends of them like a permanent decoration installed in a moment of gruesome whimsy by some gunsmith gone mad himself. She tried once more to pull the trigger, and then came down from the ladder with the gun, remembering just in time to push the safety back before she sank down at the foot of it. She couldn’t even cry. There were no tears left.

In a few minutes she had strength enough again to gather up the gun and blanket and go back inside the forward cabin with them. She unloaded the gun, dropped it on the bunk, and put the two shells back in the box. That ended it. She knew now. Not even to save John’s life could she assassinate in cold blood a boy who didn’t know what he was doing.

Or had she actually proved that? she wondered. Maybe all she’d really proved was that she couldn’t do it now, at one p.m., still five hours before the deadline, the point of no return. What about then, when she knew she was renouncing all hope of ever seeing him again? But she was too tired, too emptied to think about it now. She had to rest. She sat down on the edge of the bunk, and almost immediately, as the tension uncoiled inside her, she remembered that strange pause or hesitation when she was reaching into the drawer for the shells. Something had been trying to get her attention through the protective armor of concentration. What was it?

It had to be one of the things she’d seen in the drawer. The medicine kit! That was it. But why? Was there some connection with that story Warriner had told about the deaths from’ botulism and his vain attempts to treat it? No-o. But, wait. She had it then. The narcotics! Hope blossomed, and then just as suddenly it was gone and she sank back into the depths. Of course there was morphine in the kit, and a hypodermic syringe, but what good was it? It was hardly likely Warriner was going to let her stick a needle in his arm and inject him full of opiates. She stopped. Inject? No. There was something else. Then she sat upright. Codeine! There was a bottle of codeine tablets in it.

She ran out into the after cabin and yanked open the drawer. The medicine kit was in a wooden box with a hinged cover. She threw the cover up and began searching hurriedly through the bottles, plastic vials, and small cardboard cartons. Aspirin, paregoric, iodine, aureomycin, alcohol, sulfa, sutures—here, this was it. It was a small, square-shouldered bottle with a screw top, its neck stuffed with cotton. She lifted it out and read the typewritten label. “One tablet for relief of pain. Do not repeat within six hours.”

There seemed to be fifteen or twenty in it. One, she thought, would make you very drowsy, depending on individual tolerance. She had no idea what a lethal dose would be, but probably anything above four or five might be fatal even to a young man in the prime of life such as Warriner. She didn’t want to kill him, even in this painless and unmessy way, but on the other hand, too small a dose would be worse than none at all. It would only warn him that he’d been drugged. Three, she thought; that should be safe enough both ways. But how to administer it?

In food, or in something to drink? There’d probably be less chance of his suspecting anything if it were in something to eat. She could pulverize three of them, mix the powder with canned potted ham or something equally spicy to cover the taste, and make a sandwich of it. No, she thought then. The chances were he was going to be suspicious of anything she offered him. Irrational he might be, but he was no fool. She thought for a moment. Then she saw the answer, and she smiled for the first time in four hours.

She slammed the drawer shut and strode back to the galley section of the cabin. Having shaken three of the tablets from the bottle, she set them on the tiny drainboard shelf next to the sink and reached up into the stowage racks for a glass. She took two teaspoons from a drawer, set one of the tablets in one spoon and used the heel of the other to crush it, pressing them between her fingers. She dropped the resultant powder in the glass and was reaching for the second tablet when she felt Saracen go into a hard left turn and at the same time roll down to starboard. Both the glass and the bottle of codeine tablets started to slide. She caught the glass, but the bottle escaped her and fell on deck. It didn’t break, but it rolled and slid all the way across to the starboard side, spilling the tablets as it went. She set the glass in the sink, so it couldn’t roll off too, and went lunging after the bottle. She had it and was down on her knees picking up the scattered tablets at the foot of the companion ladder when Warriner screamed just above her. He was already in the hatch, coming down the ladder.

She sprang to her feet and wheeled to run, but it was too late. When she slid through the doorway into the forward cabin he was right behind her and there was no time even to close the door. Trapped now, she turned, seeing the agony of his face and trying to will herself not to fight him. “It was a shark!” he cried out. He caught both her arms in a grip that made them hurt. “It was a shark!” And while she was still struggling with the panic inside her, she began to grasp that he hadn’t come down here to attack her. He wanted help, comfort, something he thought she could give him, and if she could soothe him, or at least keep from antagonizing him, she might survive this crisis too. And it would be the last one. Then she remembered she still had the opened bottle of codeine tablets in her hand. She shoved the hand down beside her thigh to keep them out of sight.

“Don’t you see, it was the shark!” Then Saracen, running at full throttle with no one at the wheel, careened off the side of a swell and went into another hard turn. They lost their balance in the welter of sailbags and cases of stores around the door, and she fell backward onto the bunk. She sat up. Warriner dropped to his knees between the bunks and pressed his face into her lap, encircling her legs with his arms. His shoulders shook. Her left hand was free, but the other, holding the bottle, was trapped by his arms.

She reached down and gently stroked his head. “Of course it was the shark, Hughie.”

He raised his head then and looked up at her, and while his eyes were still wild there was nothing dangerous in them. On the contrary, they were almost beseeching, like those of a frightened child. The words began to pour out, tumbling over each other. “It was a big hammerhead, over twelve feet long. I tried to drive it away. I tried to save her. I hit—I hit it on the nose. But she was up on the surface, splashing too much. If she’d come down where I was—they won’t bother you under the water, you know that, everybody does—but she wouldn’t dive. It was horrible, the shark cut her in two, the water was all bloody…”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but what he wanted was plain enough. He was asking her for exoneration. It was the other boy who’d started the fight or had thrown the football through Mrs. Cramer’s window. She stroked his head again. “It wasn’t your fault, Hughie. Of course it was terrible, but you did everything you could.”

His arms had relaxed their grip around her legs, and she was able to slide her right hand free. While he was still looking up at her face, she brought it up the side of her thigh and shoved the bottle into the pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She sighed. He hadn’t seen it.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course I believe you,” she said.

“I knew you would. Somehow I knew it.” He hugged her legs again, almost as if in gratitude, and pressed his face against her knees. His voice was almost normal as he went on, “You won’t leave me, will you? It’s so awful—” He stopped.

She glanced down. He had raised his head again, but this time he was looking at something behind her on the bunk. It was the shotgun. She felt the chill of gooseflesh spread up her back. He went on staring, and then he whispered, “You were going to kill me.”

“No. Hughie, no. Listen—please, it’s not even loaded.”

He still hadn’t moved, and his voice was no louder than before. “You want to kill me too.”

He reached around behind her and slowly pulled it out by the barrels. There was nowhere she could run, nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything in her mind except the bitterness of the thought that after four hours she’d been within a few minutes of winning, and now she’d lost. Maybe the fear would come in a minute. She was simply too tired to handle more than one thing at a time.

With a wild outcry he lunged to his feet then and swung the gun against the side of the boat. The stock splintered and broke off against an oaken frame above and behind her head. She ducked down between the bunks as he swung again—not even at her, as far as she could tell, but merely in some fury of destruction directed against the gun itself. The barrels rang against the upright pipe of the bunk frame. He beat it twice more against the pipe and threw it behind him, into the after cabin. Above the noise of the engine she heard it slide and bounce along the deck and crash into something, probably the ladder at the after end. At the same moment, while he was turning and off balance, Saracen rolled down and the bow swung off on another violent change of course. He fell over against the bulkhead beside the door and slid down atop the sailbag behind which the compass was wedged. He was on his feet almost immediately, facing her. When she’d seen him lose his balance she’d started to scramble up, hoping to get out the door, but there wasn’t time. He was right beside it. There was nowhere to go, anyway. She sat down on the bunk again, trying to conceal her fear. Don’t fight him, she thought; don’t try to run. Her only chance to survive was to use her weapons instead of his; there was a lost and frightened boy inside the maniac, and maybe she could reach him. And he could already have killed her with the gun barrels, but he hadn’t.

He stared at her wildly for a moment and had taken a step toward her, when he turned, as if he’d remembered something. When he bent over the sailbag she knew what it was. He’d seen the compass when he fell, and the scratch pad with its penciled notations of the course. He lifted the compass out and with another cry of fury he turned and threw it against the starboard side of the cabin. The box splintered, and it fell to the deck in a ruin of broken glass and spilled alcohol.

Then, before he even had a chance to look back at her, she said gently, “Hughie, come here.” When the frenzied eyes swung around and fastened on her, she touched her knees, where his head had rested before.

“You wanted to kill me!” he cried out. His hands clenched and opened, and he took a step toward her, coming between her and the door. She saw the hands come up level with her throat, but there was a faint uncertainty or hesitation in his movements now, and she’d detected just a trace of defiance in the outcry. Without that, perhaps she couldn’t have found the self-control to do it. She continued to look up at him with perfect serenity.

“Don’t be silly, Hughie,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you.” She wasn’t sure herself how she accomplished it, but the tone was squarely on pitch, the voice of all the mothers in the world, firm but still gentle, compassionate, and forgiving. She touched her knees again and said, “Come here, dear.”

He came with a rush then. He fell to his knees before her with his face pressed against her legs, and he was crying uncontrollably.

The strength drained out of her, but she managed to remain erect while she gently stroked his head. The clatter of the engine went on. Saracen pitched, and the bow swung off onto another tangent in her blind flight across the surface of the sea. Part of it had been luck, she thought, in that the first, compulsive outburst had been directed against the shotgun, but she knew she could control him now. She had nothing more to fear from him. Except that she still couldn’t make him go back. But the codeine would take care of that.

Then she remembered the compass and looked across to the opposite side of the cabin, where spilled alcohol still dripped down the planking of the hull. Well, she thought wearily, there must be some answer to that too; she’d think of it in a minute. Apparently after four hours of improvising and feeling your way along the rim of disaster you began to develop a belief there was always another handhold just beyond.

14

Russell Bellew had been dreaming he was packing into the Bitterroot country again for elk when he awoke and he was back on that sinking abortion of a boat and the Duchess of California was poking his shoulder with a pair of rulers. She was looking down at him with that usual expression of hers, as if he were something that had just crawled out of the drain in a bus-station washroom. What the good Duchess needed, besides being knocked on her can a few times, was exactly what she’d have had this morning in about five more minutes if Goldilocks hadn’t sighted that other boat and come charging down there with his club just as he got her pinned down on the bunk. Rub it on him for practice, would she?

“Madam called?” he asked.

“Ingram said to wake you.”

He loved that bit with the rulers. He slid a hand up the back of her thigh and squeezed. “You should have used a longer stick.”

“Obviously.” There was no attempt to draw back, or hit him, and she didn’t even bother to change expression. “Then you are awake?”

He sat up. “What does Hotspur want now?”

“There’s a squall coming up.”

“So?”

“So the bird of time has but a little way to fly—”

“Shove it.”

She tore him off about three-sixteenths of an inch of another supercilious smile, dropped it in his eye, and said, “Yes, of course.” She went back on deck.

Cuddly type, the good Duchess. But somebody should have warned her before this that nobody was quite as hard as she thought she was. No doubt she was a better man than drat boar’s tit she was married to, but she was in for a shock when she found out what it’s really like out there when they take the cover off and let you look in. When that ocean started climbing up her leg she’d be screaming her tonsils loose. He didn’t like to think about it himself. Well, it couldn’t be any worse than jumping into France in the dark with those jugheads down there waiting for you. But that was a long time back. Sport, that was a long time back.

But, hell, you had to look on the bright side. Think about Hughie-boy. He wasn’t going to drown. It brought the lump right up there in your throat just thinking that Mama’s precious made it up the ladder before he chopped it loose. And he only had to kill four people to do it. But we don’t mind, do we, fellows?

He went up on deck…

It was 5:10 p.m. when the sun was blotted out and the squall burst around them. Ingram clung to the pump and looked along the deck in the fury of spray and horizontal, wind-hurled rain. Mrs. Warriner and Bellew crouched in the lee of the deckhouse, seeking the little protection they could find. Mrs. Warriner’s hair was plastered to her head and face, and Bellew’s Mexican hat was long since gone, blown overboard in the first onslaught of the wind. The deckhouse hatch was closed, as well as the two where they’d been bailing, and he and Bellew had lifted the dinghy aboard and lashed it. There was nothing else you could do. Except pray, and keep pumping.

Now that they were inside it, where all directions were the same and visibility was cut to a few yards, perspective was gone and there was no way of telling which way it was moving or how far they were from the edge, but he believed from having watched it as it made up that the worst of it was passing to the northward of them—for what that was worth. It wasn’t the wind itself he was afraid of; it was the sea, and that was the same all around them.

It was high, steep-sided, and confused, fighting the ground-swell running up from the south. Orpheus had too little freeboard now, and she was too heavy-bellied and sluggish to ride with the punch and escape any of the beating she was taking. She pitched, lurched over, and was swept from bow to stern by every breaking sea, wallowing helplessly like some huge but mortally wounded animal. She rolled down too far and hung, pinned there on her beam ends for long moments by the inertia of the water inside her, and Ingram winced, thinking of the stresses as the enormous weight of the keel pulled the other way to bring her back. He could hear the creak and groan of her timbers even above the shrieking of the wind and knew that all the while more of her fastenings were working loose and pulling out of rotten frames and planks below him. Swung around and crouched to protect his face from the stinging of the rain and spray, he continued to pump, wondering about the bed bolts of the engine. And the great keel bolts themselves …

But they continued to hold, and in another twenty minutes it began to subside. The sun broke through. The wind dropped and then died completely, and they were still afloat. At six p.m., with the sun low on the horizon, the sea had quit breaking aboard, and they were able to open the hatches to resume bailing. When Ingram looked down at the depth of water in the after cabin he knew there was very little chance she would live through the night.

* * *

It was 1:40 p.m., five minutes now since Warriner had suddenly sprung to his feet and run back on deck to take the wheel. Saracen was plowing steadily ahead, back on course—whatever it was. Rae Ingram stood beside the sink in the after cabin, crushing the last of the three codeine tablets between the spoons. The bottle containing the others was recapped and stowed in one of the drawers, ready in case she needed more. She dropped the powder into the glass, but it was the other problem she was thinking of. This idea of hers, she felt sure, would still work. Within a few minutes—with any luck at all-she might be in command of Saracen again. But what good was it if she couldn’t find her way back to the other boat?

The 226 degrees her compass had been reading meant nothing now that he’d smashed it and there was no way to compare it with the steering compass. It could have been as much as twenty or thirty degrees from the actual course. So as far as knowing what their course had been from the other boat, she was little better off than she’d been at the beginning, and now they were at least twenty-five miles away. Somehow she had to find out what he was steering. But how? Try to get a look into the binnacle when she went up? No, that wouldn’t work. It was covered, so you could see into it only from the helmsman’s seat, and he would be instantly suspicious if she tried to work her way around behind him. He wouldn’t let her, and it might even trigger him into another outburst, which would wreck her chances of success with this idea. She couldn’t risk it. Getting control of the boat came first. Wait, she thought, beginning to see the solution. The sun. It was shining, and far enough down from the meridian now to cast a good shadow. It wouldn’t be exact, but it would be a good approximation, probably near enough to bring her back within sight of the other boat.

Working rapidly now, she dropped sugar into the glass with the powder from the pulverized tablets, put in a few spoonfuls of water to start it dissolving, and squeezed in a whole lemon. Then she opened the door of the tiny electric refrigerator inset in the after bulkhead and took two ice cubes from the tray. She finished filling the glass with water and stirred until there was no trace of the powder left in the bottom and the glass itself was beaded with moisture from the cold. Warriner had been sitting there in the sun since nine this morning with nothing to drink; there wasn’t much chance he could resist it—especially if she didn’t offer it to him and was drinking from it herself. A little of it wouldn’t hurt her.

She carried it up the ladder into the hot glare of sunlight on deck. Warriner looked up from the compass with watchful appraisal but appeared to relax when she sat down on the after edge of the deckhouse beside the mizzenmast, rather than coming down into the cockpit. He said nothing. She ignored him, looking aft as if hoping to see the other boat following them. She took a sip of the lemonade.

The sun was diagonally behind her, falling over her left shoulder, which meant their course was somewhere in the vicinity of southwest. There was a good chance he was steering for the Marquesas or for Tahiti, but she couldn’t depend on that because there was no guarantee he even knew the correct course to either of them. She had to narrow it down. Moodily, as if lost in thought, she let her gaze run idly along the scupper on the port quarter, the extreme edge of the deck where it was crossed by the shadow of the mizzenmast.

Of course the shadow was by no means stationary. With Saracen’s corkscrew motion as she quartered across the swell, and his deviations on either side of the course he was steering, it moved forward and aft along the edge of the deck as much as two feet or more. But by catching it several times when the boat was on an even keel to cancel out the rolling, she was able to strike an average between the extremes of his steering. The after edge of the shadow would be about three inches forward of that lifeline stanchion, the second one counting from astern. All she had to do, if and when she got the wheel, would be to line the shadow up on that spot, note the heading on the compass, and figure out the reciprocal. But was he going to take the bait? It had already been several minutes.

She looked aft and, without appearing even to notice him, saw that his eyes had been on the glass. She raised it to her mouth, took another sip, and set it beside her on the deckhouse while she reached in her pocket for a cigarette. It was well beaded with moisture, and she knew he could see the ice. How much longer could he stand it?

“What’s that you’re drinking?” he asked then.

“Lemonade,” she said.

“Oh.”

She put the cigarette in her mouth, and returned the pack to her pocket. Let him wait. Make him ask for it. Then she saw him look at the glass again and knew she had won. Her only problem had been to make him want it.

There was no way she could lose now, whether he suspected anything or not. If he asked her to bring him a glass, she would merely make another with three of the tablets in it. And whether he did or did not demand to trade after she’d given it to him, it made no difference. But she had an idea he would take the simple way. He did.

“It looks good,” he said.

“Would you like me to make you one?” she asked.

There was a trace of slyness in his eyes now. Mother was all right when he was scared and needed her, but she wasn’t going to put anything over on him. He was too smart for that. “Why not just give me that one and make another for yourself?”

“But I’ve already drunk out of it,” she protested.

“That doesn’t matter.” He smiled, as if thinking of some secret joke, and held out his hand.

She shrugged and handed it to him and started down the ladder. Then she turned and asked, “Would you like me to make you another while I’m at it?”

“No, this will do,” he replied, still smiling. “And thanks a lot.”

Once out of sight at the foot of the ladder, she hurried forward. That should have dispelled the last doubt, she thought, and he’d gulp it right down. How long would it take? Not more than five to ten minutes, probably, but with the first wave of drowsiness he was going to know she’d tricked him and he’d be dangerous until he finally collapsed. She’d better stay here, ready to barricade the door if she saw him start down the ladder, though she didn’t believe he’d ever make it this far. Of course there was the chance he might think to close and fasten the hatch to lock her below, but it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t dare remain on deck. Anyway, noise would never wake him, that thoroughly drugged, and she could tear the hatch cover apart with a hammer and marlinspike and force her way out.

She grabbed a coiled heaving line, which was soft and easy to handle, and the knife she’d used to cut open the box of shotgun shells. With the door just cracked, she peered out, watching the hatch. A minute went by. Three. Ten. Saracen continued to plow ahead, apparently still on course. Had he become suspicious of it after all? She was sure there’d been no taste; it was well covered by the lemon and sugar. Then she felt Saracen lurch and begin to turn. At the same time a demonic cry shot up above the noise of the engine, like a prolonged scream of rage, and the glass came flying in the open hatch. It narrowly missed the radio and smashed against the bulkhead at the forward end of her bunk. Saracen rolled down and turned in the opposite direction. She continued to watch the hatch with apprehension, but sunlight fell through it unobstructed. Almost a full minute went by. Nothing happened except that Saracen continued to turn, as if she were going around in a tight circle. She could visualize what had happened. Trying to get up, holding onto the wheel, he’d turned it, and then collapsed across it.

She ran through the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered out. Then she froze. He had fallen forward across the wheel, but now he was moving again, making one last effort to get up. His face was distorted, and he cried out as though in rage against the darkness swimming around him. One hand reached down to the engine control panel. The noise of the engine cut off abruptly, his arm swung, and she saw the ignition key flash in the sunlight as he threw it overboard.

The brass cover of the binnacle followed it over the side, and then, still screaming, he had hold of the compass itself, swinging in its gimbals. Muscles writhed in his arms and shoulders, and the tendons stood out in his throat. It tore free, and while he was turning with it in his hands to throw it into the sea he fell back onto the seat and collapsed with his head and shoulders on the narrow strip of deck beside him. The compass dropped on deck, burst with an eruption of alcohol, and slid over the side as Saracen rolled down to starboard. In the abrupt and almost terrifyingly lonely silence as Saracen slowed and came to rest she could only cling to the handrail of the ladder in defeat, and for a moment she wished she had killed him when she’d had the chance. There was no other compass aboard.

Then it was gone, and she was moving ahead. After what she’d been through to get this far, nothing was going to stop her. She had no idea how she was going to find her way back across all those miles of open sea with nothing to guide her, but that would have to wait till she could get to it. The first thing was to tie him. Why, she wasn’t quite sure, because he’d probably be unconscious for at least eight or ten hours and if she hadn’t found the other boat in five or less she’d never find it at all and after that nothing mattered anyway, but he had to be immobilized once and for all. Maybe it had something to do with having been completely at his mercy for all those years since early this morning, and if there had been any way to embed him in a barrel of hardening concrete up to his neck she would have done it. She stood above him in the cockpit with her heaving line and her knife.

He hadn’t moved since he’d fallen. She reached down to touch him, a little fearfully, and then realized nothing was going to rouse him now. He was still behind the wheel, and there was no possibility at all of moving him. He must weigh 180 or 190 pounds, and, inert as he was, it would take a professional weight-lifter to get him out of there. But it didn’t matter. She could handle the wheel from the port seat of the cockpit, or standing up. The only thing that did matter was that she had to hurry.

She cut a piece about twelve feet long from the heaving line and bound his wrists together in front of him, going around them and then between them to form an unslippable pair of handcuffs. She stretched his arms out along the strip of deck and made the end of the line fast to a lifeline stanchion. Then she tied his ankles together and anchored them to the base of the binnacle. There was no way he could move at all. His face rested on his outstretched arms.

She stood up, wiped sweat from her face, and looked at her watch. It was 2:20 p.m. Her mind was instantly swamped with all the problems clamoring for attention, calculations of time and distance and the unknown factor of direction and the need to do everything at once, but she brushed them aside. One thing at a time, and the next was to start the engine. She couldn’t stand the silence. Normally she disliked the noise as much as John did, but now she needed the comfort of it to be able to think. Saracen had come to rest and was rolling forlornly on the groundswell, completely becalmed and helpless on a sea as unruffled as glass and achingly empty in all directions to the far rim of the visible world, where it met the converging bowl of the sky. With John there, it was privacy, but now it was a loneliness that screamed.

She knelt and reached in under the engine-control panel. There were wires coming up to the ammeter as well as to the ignition switch, but she could identify them by location. There were only two to the switch. She twisted and yanked until she had broken them loose. She pulled them down into view and peeled the insulation from them with the knife; then she twisted the ends together, pulled the lever back to neutral, and pressed the starter button. The engine rumbled into life and began to roar. She eased the throttle back to idle.

Now …

All she had was the sun, and she’d only have that for another four hours—unless it disappeared before then behind a cloudbank or in a squall. She’d been facing directly aft, and it had come diagonally over her left shoulder, so facing forward she’d want it in the same place. It wasn’t much, she thought fearfully. But wait—she could do better than that.

What about the shadow of the mizzenmast, and her mark? If she projected the mark to the opposite side of the boat along the same plane she should be very near the reciprocal of the course he’d been steering. She grabbed up what was left of the heaving line, whirled, and caught the wire lifeline on the port quarter beside the cockpit. Three inches forward of the second stanchion, counting from aft. Right here. She made the end of the line fast, passed it ahead of the mizzen, and went up the starboard side with it. She pulled it taut, and then moved her end aft until it just touched the forward side of the mast. It intersected the starboard lifeline nearly midway between the third and fourth stanchions, again counting from aft. She tied it there, winding the surplus line three or four times around the wire to make it easier to see from the wheel.

At best it was still only a prayer, a stab in the dark. The bearing of the sun was going to change as it moved down toward the horizon, and there was no guarantee at all that Warriner had even gone back to his original course when he’d returned to the deck after smashing her compass. But, she thought, trying to still the fear inside her, all she had to do was come within four miles of Orpheus and she’d be able to see her.

She jumped back into the cockpit, pushed the lever into gear, ran the throttle up to about where Warriner had had it, and put the wheel over. Sitting on the port seat of the cockpit beside it, she could see her marker all right. She brought Saracen on around until the shadow of the mizzenmast fell on it, swinging back and forth on either side of it as she rolled. As she steadied up, she looked at her watch. It was 2:35 p.m.

How far, how many hours? It was a few minutes past two when Warriner had stopped the engine and thrown the key overboard. From nine this morning, that would be five hours since they’d left Orpheus—less the time he’d been below while Saracen was running God knew where with no one at the wheel. Call it four and a half hours—twenty-five to twenty-seven miles. At the same speed going back, she should be in the area at seven p.m. That would be a little after sunset, perhaps not quite dark, but by then she would be running blind.

So Orpheus had to be in sight by then, because there would be no second chance. If she weren’t there, she’d already sunk, or the course had been wrong, and with no compass the latter was as irreversible as the first. Within a half-hour she’d be hopelessly lost herself, with no idea where she was going or where she’d been. She couldn’t think about it. She tried to force everything from her mind but the mechanics of steering by the shadow of the mizzenmast and the continuing prayer that the sun would go on shining.

At a little after three she began to see the dark cloud in the north. The squall was still far over the horizon, but she couldn’t take a chance of running into it with all sail set; they might be knocked down or dismasted. But she hated to stop, even for a few minutes. It appeared to be moving to the westward at the same time it was coming nearer; maybe it would be gone by the time she got there. But she should take in sail anyway; the main and the jib were going to interfere too much with her view ahead. At a little after four, while the sun was momentarily obscured by a passing cloud, she stopped and took in everything. She was under way again in less than twenty minutes, with the sun visible once more on the thinning edge of the cloud.

Warriner had never moved since he’d fallen. She began to be afraid the three tablets had been too much and she’d killed him. She reached over and touched his throat, and she could feel the pulse. It was slow but steady.

At four-thirty she reached inside the hatch for the binoculars and began to search the horizon to port and then to starboard between corrections to the helm. There was the chance Orpheus had got a breeze and John had tried to follow them.

Her eyes encountered nothing but the empty miles of water and the far rim of that circle in which they seemed to be forever centered. The noise of the engine went on, they rose and fell in a long pitching motion as the glassy billows of the swell rolled up under her quarter, but they never appeared to move at all.

It was five o’clock. Five-thirty. The squall ahead was moving into the west and breaking up. Scattered clouds began to obscure the sun at intervals, but she went on, looking over her shoulder and trying to judge its position. She continued to search the horizon to port and starboard with the glasses. The sea was empty all around her. By six the tightness in her chest was becoming almost unbearable.

Six-thirty. The sun came out from behind another cloud, and it was far down now, less than a diameter above the horizon and beginning to redden in the haze. The shadow of the mizzenmast was gone. She stood up, holding the wheel with her right hand and steering with the sun just behind her left shoulder while she held the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the sea ahead.

The colors began. Far overhead the fleecy edges of clouds were touched with gold and then pink, darkening to crimson. The sun slid downward into the low cloudbank on the horizon, and in a moment it was gone from sight and there were only the vertical rays of pale lemon extending upward against the sky. Just for an instant the defenses of her mind gave way and she remembered sunsets she had watched with John here in this cockpit in the Bahamas and Caribbean and the Gulf of Panama. She began to tremble. She dropped the engine out of gear, pulled the throttle back to idle, and leaped up on deck. She climbed atop the main boom with an arm about the mast and slowly swung the binoculars all the way around from the already darkening east to the great flame of the afterglow in the west, and there was no sign of Orpheus anywhere. It was 7:05 p.m.

15

Ingram’s eyes were bleak as he looked down into the fading light of the main cabin. If you had any talent for kidding yourself, he thought, now would be a good time to break it out. With the two of them bailing and Mrs. Warriner at the pump, the water had gained several inches in the past half-hour. They must have lost whole planks off her outer skin in that squall.

He turned and searched the emptiness of the sea down to the southwest and then glanced at his watch. It was 6:50. He dropped the bucket on the deck and went back to the others. “Knock off a minute.”

Bellew looked at him inquiringly. Mrs. Warriner straightened and pushed damp hair back from a face deeply lined with fatigue. “You mean we’re gaining on it?”

He shook his head. “No. We’re not even keeping up with it. But a quarter of an hour one way or the other’s not going to make any difference, and before it gets too dark to see I want to have one more look around from the masthead.”

He slung the glasses around his neck and shackled the sling to the main halyard again. He climbed atop the boom and stepped into the sling with his lifeline around the mast. “Haul away,” he ordered. In the confused sea left behind by the squall, Orpheus was wallowing even worse than before, but he managed the tricky business of getting past the spreaders without accident. When he was up just short of the masthead light, he called down, “That’ll do. Make fast.”

They were lying on a southerly heading at the moment. Legs locked against the dizzying swing of the mast, he looked around him. In the east the blue was already beginning to darken with the coming of night, while off to starboard the sun had dropped over the horizon and the western sky was aflame. It was impossible to escape entirely the beauty of it or to seal the mind against all of memory’s infiltration, and he was glad he was up here where they couldn’t see his face. Then he put the glasses to his eyes and began a cold and methodical search of the horizon to the southwest, fighting the lunging of the mast. He moved on into the south, and around to the east, where the light was beginning to fade. Nothing. Still nothing …

Where was she now? Was she still alive? The glasses began to shake. He lowered them and closed his eyes. The feeling passed in a moment, and he had control of himself again. He raised the glasses and came back, very slowly, across the whole area he had searched before, and then on into the dying fire and the wine-red sea of the west. He stopped abruptly. Something came up into his throat, and he swallowed. He tried to swing the glasses back, but for an instant he couldn’t. He was afraid to look again.

All right, he thought savagely; maybe you should have sent one of the men. He brought them back.

It was a mast.

Or was it? Orpheus rolled, and in the sickening swing out to port and back he lost the spot again. He got the line of the horizon in the glasses once more and inched to the right. There! It was only a tiny pencil stroke seen for an instant against the red glow of sunset. He locked his arms more tightly around the mast in an effort to stop the tremor of the glasses. It came into view, and this time he was certain he saw the other one beside it, the two of them like the tips of two toothpicks held at arm’s length before a fire. The shorter one was to the left.

“Lower away!” he shouted.

He knew what they had to do and made up his mind as he came down the mast. Below him, the others looked up silently, their faces almost red in the winy light. He landed on the boom, stepped out of the sling, and jumped down beside them.

“She’s over there,” he began. When they started to interrupt, he cut them off with a curt gesture. “Wait till I get through. She’s going to miss us. She’s hull down, even from up there; all I got was a glimpse of the masts against the sunset. She’s due west of us, headed north, and she won’t get any closer. From where she is, down on deck, we’re clear over the horizon, so there s no way in God’s world she can see us—”

“There’s no way we can signal her?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

“Just one. Set this one afire.”

“Oh.” She gave him a startled look, and then she was calm again. “Could she see it from over there?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?” Bellew interrupted. “That’s great.”

“Shut up.” He went on. “There’s a good chance. We’re to the east of her, so it’ll be dark behind us in another fifteen minutes. And there are enough clouds overhead to reflect the glow.”

“And if she doesn’t see us?” Bellew asked. “But don’t bother to tell me, let me guess. We take a taxi to the McAlpin Hotel—”

“We do the same thing we’re going to do anyway,” Ingram said coldly. “We drown. The water’s gained at least three inches on us in the past half-hour, with all three of us working. She won’t last till midnight.” They were wasting time with this idiotic argument. He swung around to Mrs. Warriner. “It’s your yacht, and you’re still aboard it—”

“Burn it, of course,” she said coolly.

Bellew shrugged. “Okay. What are we waiting for?”

“Will it burn?” she asked. “I mean, this low in the water, and with everything up here wet from the squall?”

“We’ll fire it in the chartroom,” Ingram replied. “There’s no gasoline left at all?”

“No.”

“What does your galley stove burn? Bottled gas, or kerosene?”

“Kerosene. There should be several cans of it in the locker forward.”

“Right. What about paint stores—turpentine, linseed oil, thinner?”

“There should be some of each.”

“Good.” He began to issue terse orders. “Get your passports, money, and the logbook; you can’t take anything else. Wrap them in something waterproof. Dump the water out of that dinghy and stow ‘em in there, along with a couple of flashlights. Put on lifebelts, and then you can give me a hand.”

Without even waiting for a reply, he whirled and ran down into the chartroom. He grabbed a flashlight from its bracket and went on down the steps and through the main and forward cabins, where the debris-laden water washed around his thighs. Opposite the sail bin was another locker. He unlatched the doors and yanked them open but could see nothing in the thickening gloom here below. He switched on the flashlight and wedged it between two of the sailbags. In an upper compartment were some tools and paint brushes. He spied a small hand ax and stuck the handle of it in his belt. The bottom of the locker was filled with buckets and rectangular one-gallon cans submerged and bumping together in the water that surged back and forth.

The buckets would be paint. He ignored them and began fishing out the cans. There were a dozen of them, mostly unidentifiable, the labels long since washed off, but it didn’t matter. An armful at a time, he carried them up the ladder going on deck from the forward cabin and dumped them beside the hatch. As he made the last trip he saw that Bellew and Mrs. Warriner had returned to the deck, wearing lifebelts, and Bellew had the dinghy up on its side, pouring the water out of it.

The great flame in the west was dying now, and the brief twilight of the tropics had already begun. He grabbed up two of the cans and ran aft.

“What now?” Bellew asked.

“Let’s get the dinghy over.” With a swing of the hand ax he knocked out one of the windows of the deckhouse and tossed the two cans in on the chartroom table. Mrs. Warriner was holding two flashlights and a package wrapped in oilskins. As she stowed them in the dinghy he noticed the compass had fallen out when Bellew had dumped out the water. It wasn’t broken. He put it back in.

“Grab the bow,” he said to Bellew. They lifted it over the lifeline and, when Orpheus rolled down, set it in the water. It rode lightly on the heavy swell passing beneath them. He handed the painter to Mrs. Warriner. “Take it aft and just wait. Keep it fended off so it doesn’t get caught under the counter.”

Whirling to Bellew, he said, “Bring up a couple of those spare sails from the locker. It doesn’t matter which ones. Dump ‘em there alongside the mainmast. And then bring all those cans aft, the ones around the forward hatch.”

“Where do you want ‘em?” Bellew asked.

“Just forward of the cockpit’s all right.” He turned and ran down the steps into the chartroom. Quick blows of the hand ax knocked out the rest of the windows. He began yanking drawers out of the chart table and smashing them with the ax after he had dumped out the charts. He tore charts into strips until he had a great armful of paper. He piled this on a corner of the table and threw the splintered drawers on top of it. With another blow of the ax he cut through one of the cans. As the liquid gushed out, he could tell by the smell of it that it was paint-thinner. He poured it over the paper and wood and cut open the other can. This one was kerosene. He swung it, splashing the bulkheads, the deck, and the table. Grabbing up another chart, he nicked his cigar lighter. The lighter was wet and required several attempts before it worked. He held it to the corner of the chart and, when it was burning, tossed it on the pile. With a great sucking sound it all burst into flame at once. He threw the rest of the charts on it and ran out.

Bellew had the two sailbags piled beside the mainmast now and was hurrying back and forth, carrying the cans aft. With his knife open, beginning at the end of the boom, Ingram went forward, slicing through the gaskets of the furled mainsail. When he reached the mast he unshackled the sling and made the halyard fast to the head of the sail again. Two more quick slashes split the sailbags. He hauled the sails out and stretched them along the deck, one atop the other. He grabbed up a line at random, cut off a length, made it fast around the two sails somewhere near the center, and hauled the whole cumbersome bundle over to the base of the mast. He made the line fast to the halyard above the shackle.

Bellew was passing then with the last of the cans. He grabbed two of them from his arms and swung the ax on them. The first was linseed oil. He poured it on the two sails. The other was kerosene. He dumped this on them also, and onto the mainsail, which was dangling in folds along the boom. He could hear the fire beginning to roar below him now, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows. “Give me a hand on this halyard,” he called out to Bellew.

They hoisted. The mainsail went up, and with it the great dangling mass of the two spare sails made fast to the head of it. Kerosene and linseed oil began to drip on them.

Bellew grunted. “For that real homey feeling, it ought to be gasoline.”

“If it breaks out of the chartroom,” Ingram said, “go right over the side;”

“Don’t give it a thought, sport. I just look stupid.”

It was up. Ingram threw the hitches on the pin, and they ran aft. Flame was beginning to lick through the broken windows. “Into the dinghy,” he ordered and nodded to Bellew. “You first. Take the oars.” Bellew stepped down into it and held it while he helped Mrs. Warriner in.

She protested. “Aren’t you going to get in?”

“It won’t take three; it’ll capsize.”

“But you haven’t even got a lifebelt—”

He cut her off. “I don’t need one. Pull clear and wait for me. I want this thing to go all at once, and go high—the higher the better. Get going.” He waved them off. Bellew shipped the oars and they began to draw away in the thickening dusk, heaving up and down on the swell.

There were eight of the rectangular cans on deck at the forward end of the cockpit. He set them up on end one at a time and began swinging the ax. The first was spar varnish. He picked it up and threw it forward. It landed just beyond the mainmast and slid, spilling its contents along the deck. The next was kerosene. It went up the other side of the deck. Turpentine. It followed the varnish. Paint-thinner. That was the trigger, the most volatile of them all. He set it aside, upright on the cockpit seat with his knee braced against it so it wouldn’t turn over and spill. Linseed oil. He threw it forward.

It bounced and slid, spraying along the deck. The whole interior of the chartroom was a roaring mass of flame now, and he could feel the heat on his face. The varnish on the underside of the main boom was beginning to bubble. He had to hurry. There were only seconds left before it broke out through the roof.

He swung the ax on another can, and another. Some of them had already slid overboard, but their contents had spilled, and the whole deck forward of him was crisscrossed with trails of varnish, linseed oil, turpentine, and kerosene, flowing across the planks and soaking into the seams. The final can was another of paint-thinner. He dropped the ax and picked it up, along with the other can, the one beside his knee.

He ran to the after end of the cockpit and jumped up onto the narrow strip of deck right on the stern. All right, honey, this is where we are. Wheeling, he threw the first can straight through a window into the inferno inside the chartroom, and while it was still in the air he threw the other and dived over the side.

Thirty yards away in the gathering night, Lillian Warriner turned and stared in wonder. My God, she thought, they shouldn’t match him against just one ocean at a time. Even while his body was still in the air, a great ball of flame burst out of the chartroom, taking the roof of the deckhouse with it and igniting the whole ketch forward of the cockpit in one mighty breath. Fire shot up the oil-soaked mainsail and ballooned in the two sails at the top of it to form—with the force of the explosion and the massive updraft from the heat below— a gigantic torch, a column of flame nearly a hundred feet high. It lit up the sea for a quarter-mile in every direction, and she could feel the heat of it on her skin.

Then he was alongside, with a hand on the gunwale. He dropped his sneakers into the dinghy. They rose as a swell passed under them. “You haven’t got much freeboard,” he said, “but I think it’ll ride if you don’t make any sudden moves. If it does swamp, the flashlights are more important than your passports and money. Try to keep at least one of them out of the water. There’s no use staying here; keep rowing west.”

Bellew turned his head, trying to see the dying band of color along the western horizon. “I’m blind,” he said, “with that glare in my face.”

“Set the compass between your feet,” Ingram said to Mrs. Warriner. “Line it up with the bow, and hold a flashlight on it so he can see it.”

She did. Bellew began to pull slowly ahead. Ingram held onto the transom very lightly with one hand and kicked with his feet. When they were a hundred yards away he turned and looked back. It was like a scene from hell, he thought, with the red glare reflected on the black and oily heaving of the sea. The first great pillar of flame had died now that the sails were gone, and they were already in the edge of the surrounding darkness, but she was burning fiercely from bow to stern. The glow in the sky would still be visible for miles.

“Will it last long enough for her to get here?” Mrs. Warriner asked above him.

“No,” he said. “It’ll burn to the waterline and sink in twenty minutes or so. It’ll take her an hour, or an hour and a half. But it doesn’t matter; she’ll take a bearing on it and have a compass course.”

She made no reply. They went on toward the darkness. He thought she might turn for one last look, but she didn’t. She remained quite still, her face lowered over the compass between her feet. It was possible she was crying, but if she was, he thought, nobody would ever know it except her.

The same question was in both their minds, he knew, the same dread of what they might find aboard Saracen. He thought of the shotgun and shivered.

* * *

She’d got under way again because she had to keep moving as long as she could. The silence was out there waiting for her, and once she stopped and killed the engine with the acceptance of final defeat she would be defenseless and she wasn’t sure she would survive it.

It was 7:20 p.m. There was still enough faint light and dying color along the rim of the horizon to show her where west was, and there would continue to be, probably, for another ten minutes. Everywhere else it was already night. Across from her, Warriner’s naked shoulders and golden head were only a faint gleam in the darkness. She was standing up, holding the wheel with one hand and staring ahead into the north, when something flickered on the extreme edge of her peripheral vision. She turned her head and saw the little tongue of reddish light lick upward over the edge of the world far off to the eastward.

For a second or two she could only stare at it in a sort of stunned disbelief. Then tears came up into her eyes and blinded her for an instant as this gave way to a great surge of joy, but by then she already had the wheel hard over and was coming around. She lined it up alongside the masts and reached for the throttle. The engine noise increased to a roar as it came up the final notch to full wide open.

How far? She’d seen nothing there before, even with the binoculars, which meant it was clear over the horizon—six, eight, or even ten miles away. But John must have seen her against the sunset and then deliberately set Orpheus afire because he had no other way to signal her. The only way he could have seen her would have been from the masthead, so there were probably others aboard. But that was unimportant at the moment. She had something to guide her now. That was all that mattered.

In another few minutes the little tip of flame was no longer showing over the horizon, but the glow was clearly visible against the sky. She felt a moment’s uneasiness. How long would it burn before it sank? If it were even eight miles away, it would take her nearly an hour and a half to get there. It was almost due east, but that was no help once the last of the light was gone from the west and all directions were the same. She had to have a star or some constellation she could recognize, one still low enough on the horizon to give her the direction. But ahead of her, above the glow, the sky was becoming overcast. Almost instinctively she glanced to the north before she remembered Polaris was below the horizon now. They were south of the equator.

She turned to look astern, and saw the answer, if the sky remained clear enough in the west. Venus had just emerged from behind a cloud. It was perhaps three hours behind the sun, well down toward the horizon directly behind her. She faced forward, less worried now. Twenty minutes passed. The faint reddish glow was still visible ahead, reflected from the underside of the clouds above it. She kept it lined up beside the masts. It began to fade. Then, thirty-five minutes after she had first sighted it, it disappeared with the abruptness of a snuffed-out candle. Orpheus had gone down.

Venus was still bright behind her. She went on. It was awkward and not very accurate, trying to steer looking over her shoulder, so she stood up, facing aft directly before the wheel, and tried to keep the planet poised over the end of the mizzen boom. She reached inside the hatch and switched on the running lights. Venus began to disappear in the edge of another cloud. She tried to guess its bearing, but when it reappeared fifteen minutes later it was far around to starboard. She’d been running almost south.

She swung the wheel to bring it astern again and turned herself, to look forward, searching the horizon on both sides and ahead for any tiny pinpoint of light. She must be within two or three miles of them. On all sides the darkness was unbroken. Then Venus faded and disappeared again. The western sky was becoming overcast. Directly overhead stars were visible through holes in the clouds but there was nothing anywhere that was low enough on the horizon to guide her. In two more minutes she was hopelessly lost, with no more knowledge of direction than if she were at the bottom of a well.

She jerked the throttle back and threw the engine out of gear. It was absolutely imperative now that she stay exactly where she was; every turn of the propeller could be taking her away from them instead of nearer. She pulled the twisted wires apart to stop the engine’s noise so she could listen as she climbed atop the main boom to search the darkness all around. There was no light, no cry. She came down from the boom and ran below for a can of flares.

* * *

There was no fire behind them now; Orpheus had gone down nearly fifteen minutes ago. “Still nothing,” Mrs. Warriner said above him in the darkness. Each time they crested a swell she searched the sea ahead, while Bellew continued to pull at the oars.

“What time is it now?” he asked.

She held her watch under the beam of the flashlight. “Eight-ten.”

It had been fifty minutes. They should have picked up Saracen’s masthead light by now. “You’ve got too much light under you,” he said. “Hold the flashlight by the lens so it’s completely covered by your hand except one spot right over the compass. Bellew will still be able to see it. Then put that bundle of oilskins across your lap so no light seeps up at all. And when you locate the horizon, don’t look directly at it; look a little above. Night vision’s better out of the edges of your eyes.”

Down in the water and behind the dinghy, he could see nothing at all. Another fifteen minutes went by. The dark undulations of the swell rolled up under them and slid past in silence except for the creak of oarlocks. “Maybe if I stood up—” she said.

“No. You’ll capsize. We’re bound to pick her up in a minute. We’re still right on course? Bellew, I mean; don’t look down at the light yourself.”

“Due west all the time,” Bellew replied. Then he went on, an undertone of ugliness in his voice. “You know what, sport? Wouldn’t it be a real gas if you didn’t see any masts over there?”

“I saw masts,” Ingram said coldly. It was for Mrs. Warriner’s benefit. He had no interest at all in what Bellew thought.

There was a sudden cry from Mrs. Warriner. “I see her! I see her!”

“Where?”

“Way off to the left. My left.”

“All right,” he said calmly. “Don’t take your eyes off it. Bellew, pull your left oar till she tells you to steady up, and then check your compass.”

Bellew came around. “Steady. Right there,” Mrs. Warriner said.

“Almost due south,” Bellew reported. “One-eighty-five to one-ninety.”

Ingram swam out from behind the dinghy, and when they rose to the next swell peered into the darkness ahead. He could see nothing at all. He was too low. But why was she so far off course? At a distance of even eight miles she should have passed within a few hundred yards of them. “Can you see the port running light?” he asked.

“No. Only the masthead light,” Mrs. Warriner replied. “She must be a mile, or two miles away. Wait. I think I saw the red light then. Yes, there it is. She must have been going away from us, and then turned.”

“All right,” he said. “Forget the compass for a minute. You can keep Bellew headed straight. Take both your flashlights and hold ‘em as far over your head as you can—”

He was interrupted by a sudden cry from Mrs. Warriner, and at the same instant he saw it himself. A rocket arched into the sky ahead of them, hung poised for an instant, and began to float down like some great glowing flower.

“She’s lost herself,” Bellew said. “Hell, I thought you said she could take a bearing—”

Ingram cut him off savagely. “Save it!” Then he went on to Mrs. Warriner. “As soon as that goes out and she can see again, start waving your lights, pointed straight at her.”

She held them ready but made no reply, and he wondered if she were prey to the same chilling thoughts that were running through his own mind. Probably. Anybody but a stupid meathead like Bellew would know something must be wrong aboard Saracen. Was she hurt? Or had she killed Warriner and now was beginning to go to pieces? Then the flare went out ahead of them, and Mrs. Warriner was signaling. Several minutes went by while they rose and fell in silence.

Then Mrs. Warriner cried out. “She’s turned. I can see both running lights!”

Ingram sighed. She’d sighted them and was coming.

16

The range was closing. ahead of her the flashing lights were less than a quarter-mile away. Then it occurred to her he might be in the water instead of the dinghy, and she left the wheel long enough to run forward and hang the ladder over the side. Her knees were suddenly too weak to support her, and she almost fell coming back to the cockpit. It was difficult to breathe, and she was conscious of the pounding of her heart. She stared ahead at the two flashlights as if trying to burn away the darkness surrounding them. Two hundred yards …

She brought the throttle back and reached inside the hatch to turn on the spreader lights. The sea was illuminated for twenty or thirty yards on all sides of her, but she could still see the signals dead ahead.

She came hard left, and then right. She pulled the lever into reverse and backed down, racing the engine. Saracen came to rest, and the lights were less than fifty yards away, directly abeam. She reached down and yanked the wires apart, and in the sudden silence she could hear the rattle of oarlocks. He was in the dinghy. She leaned across the cockpit seat, staring outward.

Now she could see it. It was coming into the outer limits of the spreader lights. There were two people in it. John was rowing, and there was somebody smaller in the stern. She thought it was a woman— It wasn’t John rowing. He was bigger than John. It was somebody she’d never seen before, and the other one was a woman, and there was nobody else. Then she saw the head come out from behind the dinghy, the man swimming, and the upraised arm waving to her. She slid down into the cockpit seat with one hand still feebly clutching the lifeline above her, unable even to raise her head, and her diaphragm began to kick so she couldn’t exhale. Every time she would try to breathe out, it would kick and she would inhale again.

Ingram saw her slide down and could see no sign of Warriner. “Ill go aboard first,” he said to Mrs. Warriner. She was staring straight ahead, and when Saracen rolled down she thought she saw something on the other side of the cockpit, beyond Mrs. Ingram. Something sprawled. “Yes,” she said in a controlled but very fragile voice. “Yes. Thank you.”

Ingram lunged ahead and went up the ladder while they were coming alongside. Rae was sitting up now, and was apparently unhurt except for that bruise on her face. Beyond her he could see Warriner’s body, but in the same glance he saw the bound wrists and the line going forward to the stanchion, and all the breath went out of him at once.

Rae was still looking up at him. “He smash—he smu—he smu—” She tried to point, but he had already seen the uncovered and empty binnacle, like an eyeless socket, and understood. Probably wrecked the other one too, he thought. So she came all the way back and found us with nothing at all. He wanted to say something, but his eyes had begun to sting, and he didn’t trust his voice. Without even looking around, he gestured for the others to come aboard and reached down for her arm. She made it to her feet. She went down the ladder, and when she was in the darkness at the bottom of it, she turned.

She still couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t even cry. She was wrung out, drained, emptied of everything. She could only manage to get her arms up around his neck and cling while his went on crushing her, moving up and down her back as if they couldn’t find any place they wanted to stay, while water dripped on her and whiskers ground into her face and the voice was saying, “Oh, Jesus Christ—oh, Jesus Christ—” against her throat.

The last handhold crumbled then, but instead of falling she was floating upward into some welcoming and completely sheltered oblivion, like a child’s going to sleep. She felt herself being lifted and placed on the bunk. The arms still bound her, and the voice went on with its profane and ragged whispering, this time into her hair. Then, just before she disappeared entirely into the mist, she heard her own voice say something at last.

“Did you have any lunch?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He swallowed and rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I guess I forgot.” He kissed her again but knew she was gone. He still knelt beside her, and now he brought a hand up and placed the finger tips very gently against her throat to feel the pulse. And even after he was reassured she was all right, that she had merely reached the limit of endurance and stopped for a moment, he left the hand there, feeling her life run steadily on beneath his fingers. He didn’t even know why he did it.

He got up for a cloth to bathe her face, and when he switched on the lights he saw the battered shotgun barrels on the deck beside the ladder. He took a long and shaky breath and shook his head.

She was just beginning to stir again when he heard the voices above him, the one a lashing impassioned whisper, “Leave him alone!” followed by the sharp slap of palm on flesh, and hoped she hadn’t heard too. After what she’d been through, she deserved at least a few minutes of thinking it was all over. He thought of what was ahead of them and suddenly felt very old and tired. But the only chance they had was to meet it now, and head-on. He ran up the ladder.

Mrs. Warriner was trying to get up from where she was sprawled back on the cockpit seat. Beyond her, Bellew was standing on the narrow strip of deck, trying to turn Warriner’s face up with the toe of his shoe. “Wake up, old Hughie-boy, and see who’s here.”

“All right, Bellew,” he ordered, “leave him alone.”

The other turned, and in the glow of the spreader lights above and forward of them he could see the insolence in the eyes. “Easy does it, Hotspur. You got your boat back, so just simmer down. This is mine.”

“That’s right; I got it back. And I give the orders on it. You heard what I said.” There was no area for compromise here, not with Bellew. If it meant forcing the issue now, within the first five minutes, force it. But at that moment Mrs. Warriner sat up, the side of her face still red from the slap. Her voice was level and very cold as she spoke to Bellew. “I warn you. Don’t touch him.”

Bellew sat down on the opposite side of the cockpit. He leaned forward and tapped her on the knee with a forefinger. “Don’t crowd me. I’ve had it. With you and your gold-plated fag.”

Twelve hundred miles, Ingram thought, in a forty-foot yacht, with the third one crazy. He wondered what Lloyds would quote you on that. “That’ll do,” he snapped. He felt a little better now that Bellew had sat down. The situation wasn’t going to explode as long as Warriner was asleep, or knocked out, or whatever he was. If he could leave the three of them alone for as long as five seconds he might find out.

“It does seem to me,” Mrs. Warriner said then, “that one of us might make at least some casual inquiry as to how Mrs. Ingram is.” She turned to him. “Is she hurt?”

“No,” he said. “Not as far as I could tell. She’s had a little too much for one day, and she fainted, but she’s coming around now.” He turned to go back below. It should be safe enough now, and Mrs. Warriner would sing out if anything happened.

“How’d she get the creep tied up?” Bellew asked.

“How the hell do I know?” he said. “I had some stupid idea that after a whole day of it I might get a chance to talk to her for a minute and a half—” He broke off, realizing he had to keep his temper.

“Sure, sure.” Bellew grinned coldly. “I can understand you might have been a little worried. That’s where I was one up on you, chum. I didn’t have to worry about mine; I knew where she was.”

That was the question you always had to ask yourself, Ingram thought, before you jumped all the way down his throat. Suppose it had been Rae? But it didn’t change anything; it would be as stupid as hating the Pacific Ocean because she’d been swept overboard by a sea. “Bellew, for Christ’s sake, don’t you think I realize what it’s like? But it’s just something you can’t change; you’ll only make it worse—”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Warriner interrupted.

She knows, he thought; she knows, all right, but she just won’t accept it. At that moment Rae’s head appeared above the hatch. So he wasn’t even going to get a moment to talk to her alone, to fill her in on who these people were and what had to be done. In fact, for at least the next twenty to twenty-five days—assuming they lived that long—he’d never have a minute completely alone with her. He was conscious of a dark and futile anger but choked it off. The situation was still far too dangerous to be crying over lost privacy and interrupted honeymoons.

He sprang to help her and seated her on the after edge of the deckhouse. “Are you all right now, honey?”

She managed a smile. “Yes. Just a little weak from the reaction.”

“Aren’t we all?” He turned, indicating the others. “This is Mrs. Warriner. And Mr. Bellew.”

“Hi,” Bellew said. Mrs. Warriner leaned forward and took her hand, and said simply, “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Rae said. “It’s all over now—” She broke off and gasped. “John! The other compass! He smashed that too. We haven’t got anything.”

Ingram nodded. “I figured he had, or you’d have had it up here. But it’s all right. There’s one in the dinghy. I can make it do.”

He stepped forward and lifted it out. The others had already removed the flashlights and the oilskin package containing their passports. He cast off the painter and pushed the dinghy away from the side. Holding the compass very carefully, he went below and stowed it in a drawer. It was beyond price now, and nothing was going to happen to it until he could get it secured in or on the binnacle. He still didn’t know what was going to happen up there. He went back and sat down beside Rae. “All right, honey, if you’re up to it now, can you tell us what happened? How did you get him tied up?”

“Codeine,” she said. “I gave him three of those codeine tablets from the medicine chest, in a glass of lemonade. I think he’s still all right, and it’s been over six hours.”

The others watched silently while he stepped over and reached down to check Warriner’s pulse. He knew Mrs. Warriner would have already, but he wanted to be sure himself. It was steady. “He’s okay,” he said. He came back.

Rae told them the rest of the story. When she had finished, she looked at Mrs. Warriner. “I still don’t know. I mean, if the codeine idea hadn’t worked, and he hadn’t smashed the shotgun.”

Mrs. Warriner touched her on the arm. “I understand, dear. And you’ll forget it eventually. We all just thank God it ended the way it did.”

“Well, don’t break up, girls,” Bellew said. “Mama’s precious is a-l-l right; he’s not hurt. Tomorrow you can draw straws to see who’s the lucky girl he’ll kill next.”

Rae shot a startled and puzzled glance at Ingram. “What happened to him? I couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying. Something about a shark.”

Before Ingram could reply, Mrs. Warriner and Bellew both spoke at once. Bellew overrode her. “Well, nothing much.” He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. “He killed my wife, and then this morning he slugged me and locked us in the cabin on there to drown when he abandoned ship. But, I mean, hell, nobody minds these little jokes as long as they keep Hughie happy—”

“He didn’t kill your wife!” Mrs. Warriner lashed out. “And why don’t you go ahead and tell the Ingrams why he locked us in there?”

“Wait a minute! Hold it!” Ingram cut them both off. “Rae’s entitled to know what this is all about.” As briefly as he could, he told her something of it.

Then he went on, to Mrs. Warriner and Bellew. “I want both of you to listen to me a minute. After your experience on Orpheus I shouldn’t think you’d have too much trouble understanding what we’re up against. We’re twelve hundred miles from land, we still don’t know when we’ll pick up the Trades, and with the very best of luck it could be twenty days or more we’re going to be jammed in here. There are five of us on a yacht with cruising accommodations for two, and one’s unbalanced and dangerous and is going to have to be tied up and watched every minute to keep him from killing himself or somebody else—”

“Unh-unh,” Bellew interrupted. “No sweat at all, pal. All he’s going to need is a basket.”

“So you’re going to kill him? In front of three witnesses. Just what do you do then? Kill us too?”

“I’m not going to kill him. You think I’m stupid, or something? You might say I’m going to immobilize him—”

“Maybe you’d better wait till I get through,” Ingram said. “You might change your mind. If you don’t, there’s a good chance none of us will ever reach land. We’ve got enough food, and the water will stretch, with rationing. But that’s not it. I’m the only one on here that can take this boat down there—the only one who can navigate well enough, in the first place, and the only one who can compensate that compass so we won’t be wandering all over hell and halfway back, trying to make a landfall. And I’m not going to stand here and just look on—any more than Mrs. Warriner is—while you make a cripple or a permanent imbecile out of a boy who’s not responsible for his actions—”

“Jesus Christ, you too?”

“I said wait till I get through. To beat up a man in his mental condition, you’d have to be sicker than he is. And as I told you, none of us is going to stand here and watch it, so if you lay a hand on him this thing is going to blow wide open. I’d say there’s a good chance you can whip me, but if I get beaten up so badly I can’t sail this boat or navigate, you’re not doing yourself any favor, unless you think you’d like drifting around out here while your tongue swells up and you go crazy.

“And there’s another thing I don’t think you’ve thought of. He’s scared to death of you, and if you touch him he’ll go completely berserk. You may be stupid enough to want to see what’ll happen when a man runs amok on a forty-foot yacht with four other people on it, but the rest of us are not. Also, this is no hospital, so what do you do if he dies? So far, everything that’s happened has been the result of an accident or bad luck or his crackup, and nobody’s committed a deliberately criminal act—”

“You call what he did to my wife an accident?”

“For Christ’s sake, Bellew, he panicked! You want to beat him to death because he got scared and lost his head?”

“Captain Ingram!” It was Mrs. Warriner this time. Well, he’d been expecting it.

He turned to her. “Bellew’s right,” he said wearily, “and you know it. I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with the blame for the whole thing, but your husband didn’t crack up because he thought you and Bellew tried to kill him. That’s just another place to hide, another way to try to pass the buck. There’s no doubt he’s afraid of Bellew, and he’ll be ten times as afraid of him now, but nobody in his right mind who’d known you for as long as an hour would ever believe anything as stupid as that. He was already irrational when he came up with that gem—”

“Wait a minute!” Mrs. Warriner interrupted. “You still don’t know the whole story. Why do you think we were both in that one cabin when you found us? Hughie hit Bellew and locked us in there because when he came below he found this vermin —this incredible, filthy, loathsome pig—already there trying to get into bed with me. What was he supposed to think? If he’d had any doubts before, that would settle them. I hadn’t made any noise; being raped was preferable to having Hughie come running down there and probably be beaten to death.”

Ingram looked at Bellew, trying to keep the contempt from showing any more than necessary. Don’t push him, he thought; he’s pretty close to the edge. But the latter was completely at ease. “Rape! Geez! So maybe I was trying to collect what you owed me; it had nothing to do with it, anyway. Hughie-boy already had his club with him when he came down there. He brought it from deck, because he’d already sighted this boat over here.”

The son of a bitch, Ingram thought. The dirty, sad—

“If you were that broken up over your wife’s death,” Rae asked, “how did you ever happen to notice she was missing?”

Ingram gripped her arm and shook his head at her, but neither of the others had heard her anyway.

At least he knew now why Mrs. Warriner insisted on assuming all the guilt, even if she was probably still wrong. “Listen,” he said, “that doesn’t change anything. He locked you in there because he was already irrational, and he was irrational simply because his mind refused to accept the fact he’d been responsible for Mrs. Bellew’s death.” Then he wondered if he was being very smart. This would only inflame Bellew even more. No, Bellew already knew it anyway, and if he was brutal and stupid enough to want to smash up a boy who was mentally sick, this was merely superfluous and would have no effect on him one way or the other. And somehow he had to reach Mrs. Warriner.

Even while he was conscious of a faint self-disgust for beginning to sound like a cocktail-party psychiatrist, he couldn’t escape the feeling that her illogical burden of guilt was probably as dangerous here as Bellew’s vindictiveness, and just as likely to trigger an explosion. And certainly it made it a lot more dangerous, and unnecessarily dangerous, for her. Not having any interest at all in what happened to her if anything happened to Warriner, she’d attack Bellew with anything in sight, and the consequences of that wouldn’t be anything you’d ever want to remember—if you lived long enough to remember anything. Then, just for a moment, he was tempted to throw up his hands and let the three of them go ahead and kill themselves. Why did he have to defend Warriner, who’d caused the whole thing, when obviously his responsibility was to Rae? Was he going to endanger her life again for that alibi-artist, merely because he was helpless? But he knew he couldn’t turn his back on it, even aside from the fact that once it started it couldn’t be contained or avoided anyway. And, in the end, there was always Mrs. Warriner. She was worth fifty of the other two, and you couldn’t let her throw herself into the meat-grinder from some misguided feeling of guilt.

“For God’s sake,” he went on wearily, “none of it was your fault, and you’re not even doing him any good by trying to take the blame. I’m no head-shrinker, but it seems to me the chances are very good he can be brought out of it, with proper treatment. But he has to admit it. I don’t think it’s a feeling of guilt that made him crack up, but just the refusal to accept the blame. And as long as you go on grabbing all of it in sight, he never will. Jesus, there’s no crime in losing your head. Anybody can do it; it’s unpredictable. You know that yourself, Bellew—”

“No, I don’t, good-buddy. I say nobody but a limp-wristed punk like Hughie-boy could do it, but then I’d never argue with a smart bastard like you. Why don’t you write a book?”

He bit down hard on his temper. The whole attempt to appeal to the man had been futile, and any minute it was going to get out of hand. He had to move Warriner, and he’d better do it now, before he waked up. If he could get him shut up in that forward cabin, out of sight, they might make it through the night without an eruption of violence, and by morning Bellew would have had a chance to think twice about it. But getting him out from behind the wheel and down the ladder wasn’t going to be easy. He was on the point of telling Bellew to give him a hand when he remembered the old axiom: never give an order you know is going to be ignored.

He turned to Mrs. Warriner. “I think the best place for him is in the forward cabin. The rest of us can use the two bunks in the main cabin in relays, or flake out on deck, subject to the watches we work out. So if you’ll take his feet, we’ll move him down there now.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. She stood up.

“No,” Bellew said. “As you were.”

“What?” she asked.

“Goldilocks stays right where he is.” Bellew reached out a foot, put it against her midriff, and pushed. She sat down again.

There was no point in even saying anything, Ingram thought coldly. The act was deliberate and self-explanatory. He was already on his feet, and he hit Bellew as hard as he could just under the ear, as he was getting to his. The only chance he had was to hurt him, and hurt him badly, right at the start. But even as the blow landed, he knew he’d lost. Bellew rolled back with it with the ease and the beautiful reflexes of a pro and counterpunched with almost unbelievable speed for a man his size. Ingram felt the wind go out of him as a fist like a concrete block slammed into his stomach; and then another, which he only partially blocked, hit him over the heart. He started to fall but came back against the mizzen. Bellew hit him twice more in the stomach. Sickness ballooned inside him. He heard Rae shriek behind him, and Mrs. Warriner was trying to get past him to reach Bellew herself.

It was no place to fight; there was no room. He pushed off the mast, blocked Bellew’s next punch, and managed to get under his guard with a right. Saracen rolled down to starboard. Bellew straightened, off balance, and Ingram hit him again. Bellew went back across the cockpit seat. Ingram swung again, lost his balance, and came down on top of him. They were in the after end of the cockpit, against the binnacle, and Ingram landed with his right forearm across the side of Warriner’s face. Warriner stirred and groaned.

Ingram felt an arm lock around his neck and the thumb of the other hand groping for his eyes. He ducked his face down in Bellew’s throat and brought his right hand up, grinding the heel of it as he pushed upward, and felt the nose flatten with the tearing of cartilage. Bellew released his neck, pushed him upward, and then kicked out with both feet against his chest. He came up and back, felt his head strike the mizzen boom, and sagged to his knees. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw Rae emerging from the hatch with the shotgun barrels in her hand, raising them to swing.

Bellew whirled as lightly as a cat, caught her arm, and yanked. She came catapulting up on deck. Bellew plucked the gun barrels from her, threw them outward into the sea, and cuffed her backward across the deckhouse in three smooth and almost simultaneous blurs of motion. Ingram was on his feet again. Bellew turned back to him, grinning and hideous with blood running down his face and onto his chest from the pulpy ruin of his nose. Ingram tried to swing, and then something like the popping of a flash bulb went off inside his head and he was on the bottom of the cockpit.

He wasn’t completely out, but dazed and too sick and too weak to get up. He tried. He pushed upward with his arms, felt Saracen roll all the way over and spin end-for-end, and collapsed again. He was under the edge of the wheel, and inches in front of his face two feet in white canvas shoes were bound to the bottom of the binnacle with a section of old heaving line. He was absorbing and cataloguing this phenomenon with the bemused wonder of a baby discovering its navel, and only beginning to fit it back into its position in a framework of time and place where everything had blown up and hadn’t yet finished settling, when somewhere far off he heard the scream begin. Then the feet moved upward—quite casually, it seemed to him—and the heaving line parted as if it were rotten string.

His mind was clear now, but he still couldn’t get up. He fell back on his side and was looking up past the wheel and the binnacle. Bellew, the gory face split in its wolfish grin, was leaning over Warriner. And Warriner was sitting up, cringing backward, still screaming.

“No, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, no! No—no—!”

Ingram vomited. He could feel the warmth of it on his hands, and the deck was slick with it as he tried again to push himself up. Mrs. Warriner materialized out of somewhere, flinging herself across his line of vision onto Bellew’s shoulders. Bellew shrugged her off. Only half turning, he slapped her backward, and she fell on Ingram’s legs.

“Come on, old Hughie-boy, old shark-killer.’’ Bellew grabbed Warriner’s shoulders and lifted. He was apparently still talking, for Ingram could see his lips move, but all sound was lost then in another cry from Warriner, a mindless, unceasing, animal screaming that lifted the hair on Ingram’s scalp and ran like ice along his back. Warriner lunged upward from behind the wheel, his legs kicking free of the remaining turns of line around them. The line from his wrists to the stanchion gave way. Muscles writhed in his arms. His hands burst apart.

Bellew shifted his grip, caught him about the waist, and lifted. He stepped up on the narrow strip of deck between the cockpit and the rail.

Mrs. Warriner was off Ingram’s legs then, springing up and toward Bellew. Ingram made it to his knees. Warriner’s cry cut off as he saw the water below him, and he spun around in Bellew’s grasp, locking his arms and legs around him as if he were clinging to the bole of a tree, and nothing was visible of his eyes except the whites. Ingram got to his feet but fell backward onto the seat. Saracen rolled down to starboard. Bellew and Warriner began to topple outward. They were already over the lifeline and almost horizontal when Mrs. Warriner leaped out onto Bellew’s back and clamped one arm around his neck while she beat at him with the other hand. All three of them, in one welded and inseparable unit, wheeled slowly over and fell into the sea.

17

“Flashlight!” he shouted to Rae, who was getting up now. He pushed himself off the cockpit seat and raised it to grope in the locker under it for a diving mask. Leaping to the rail, he looked down. None of them had come up. Bellew, even his tremendous strength powerless in Warriner’s cataleptic embrace, couldn’t break free, and Mrs. Warriner wouldn’t. She’d still be trying to separate them when she lost consciousness. Yanking the mask down over his face, he fell backward into the water.

He turned and peered downward but could see nothing. Farther out, the water was faintly illuminated from the spreader lights, but here directly under the side it was in deep shadow and it was impossible to see under the boat at all. He had only a minute or two at the most. Saracen was swinging around on the swell, and by the time he could dive twice there’d be no way of telling where they’d gone under. He kicked downward, swinging his arms in all directions, groping for them. He felt nothing.

Conscious of Saracen’s deadly mass plunging up and down on the swell within feet of him, he felt a moment’s panic. If he lost his bearings and came up under her he could be knocked unconscious. He swam to his right and started up, and at the same instant he heard them. They were under her, bumping and kicking against the hull in their struggle. Then a beam of light penetrated the water just in front of his face. His head came out of the water. Rae was leaning over the side with a flashlight, shining it downward.

“They’re underneath.” He gasped. “Shine it in under the counter.”

She ran back and threw herself flat on deck aft of the cockpit. Reaching an arm over, she threw the beam of light down and forward, past the rudder. He went under again. He was below the turn of the bilge now and could see the light angling down astern, but everything forward of it was in impenetrable shadow. Saracen plunged up and then down, rolling to starboard, toward him. He put a hand up and felt the planking, slick with marine growth, come lunging down against it. He shot downward. It stopped. Pain bit into his palm where it had been cut by a barnacle. As Saracen went back to port he swam down and in, raking the area with his arms. Then he saw Warriner and Bellew.

They were almost straight below him, falling away now and dropping into the beam of light. They were still locked together, but no arms or legs moved, and something like a plume of dark smoke was drifting upward and diffusing in the water above them. It was blood, either from Bellew’s broken nose or from some wound inflicted on one of them by the keel or hull. He kicked downward but knew at the same time it was impossible. He was already running out of breath, and they were nearly fifteen feet below him, still drifting down. But Mrs. Warriner must be still above them. He had to find her. Then his hand brushed something just below him, something soft and fern-like. It was her hair. He entwined his fingers in it and began swimming up and out, away from the hull above him. His chest hurt now, and he wondered if he would make it. He’d been a fool to come under here; his first responsibility was to Rae. Just before he blacked out, his head broke surface and he gulped hungrily at the air.

He was almost under the counter, still too near the rudder and propeller. He swam out, trying to get Mrs. Warriner’s head above the surface. Rae had seen him now. “Others—too far down—no use—” He gasped. “Ladder—” It would take too long to tow her around to the other side. Rae disappeared above him, and almost immediately the ladder was dropped over the starboard side, just forward of him. He swam up to it, towing the inert figure behind him. With the beating he had taken from Bellew, he was very weak now, and he wondered if he could get her aboard. Time was precious. She’d been unconscious for minutes.

He ducked under the surface and pulled her across his shoulder. When Saracen rolled down to starboard, he got one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, caught a lifeline stanchion with his free hand, and heaved upward, with Rae helping from above to haul her in under the lifeline until her body was on deck. He came on up himself. They lifted her down onto one of the cockpit seats. Her hair was plastered to her face and she was bleeding from a half-dozen barnacle cuts on her bare legs and shoulders, but she appeared to be uninjured otherwise.

He turned her face downward and began applying artificial respiration. Water ran out of her mouth and drained from her hair, but there was no movement. A minute went by. Two. Three. He was on the point of turning her on her back to try the mouth-to-mouth method he’d read of when he felt her begin trying to breathe again.

She retched and began to gag from the salt water she’d swallowed. He stepped back. She was breathing regularly and without difficulty now. In a few more minutes she opened her eyes. She looked around, blankly at first, and then she screamed. She came off the seat, trying to get to her feet to lunge toward the rail where they’d all gone over. He’d been expecting it. He caught her and forced her back. She fought him, still screaming. Then just as abruptly all the strength went out of her again and she collapsed. She lay face downward while her whole body shook with sobs.

Rae had disappeared. She came running up the ladder now, carrying a glass. Between them they got her upright and forced her to drink. They eased her gently back on the cushion. In a few minutes the crying ceased and she lay still.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Codeine tablet,” Rae said. She fumbled a cigarette out of her pocket, but it fell from her fingers into the bottom of the cockpit. She made as if to reach down for it, then merely sighed and collapsed on the other seat. Ingram bent and picked it up for her, but with his wet hand and the water pouring off him and down his arm it was mush by the time he’d straightened. He tossed it overboard. Saracen rolled. They looked at each other in silence.

Then Ingram’s face twisted. “Maybe if I hadn’t hit him …”

She looked up. Her voice was thin and very near the edge as she said, “Stop it! And never say that again. He was going to do it, no matter what you did, and you know it. And you saved her, didn’t you?”

“I guess you’re right.”

She rubbed a hand across her face. Then she brought the hand down and looked at its trembling. She clenched it into a fist and opened it. “With luck,” she said, “maybe I can keep from thinking about it for ten minutes, and keep from hearing—from hearing—” She swallowed, and went on. “That should be—just about long enough—to get her into that forward bunk and into dry pajamas and wrap a towel around her hair. And then take one of those codeine things myself. Because if I don’t make it, you’re going to be picking up springs and cogwheels the rest of the night. Let’s go.”

* * *

Ingram awoke just at dawn. He ached all over, and his stomach muscles felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. He turned his head in the beginnings of light inside the cabin and looked at Rae asleep in the opposite bunk. She was wearing the same sleeveless short pajamas she’d had on yesterday morning, and the mop of tawny hair was spread across the pillow, encircled by her arms. The only thing different was the discolored and swollen area on her face where Warriner had hit her. Just beyond his feet the tea kettle slid and bumped gently against the rails that kept it on the galley stove. Dishes shifted minutely in their stowage above the sink. A timber creaked. It was hot. And it was still dead calm.

He rolled out of the bunk and donned khaki shorts, remembering he could no longer run about the boat naked or clad only in a towel. His eyes softened as he looked down at Rae, and as he put on water for coffee he was careful to make no sound. He went up on deck. It could be yesterday morning all over again, he thought; everything topside was wet with dew, and the surface of the Pacific was as slick as oil except for the heaving of the swell. It was full daylight now, and the few clouds overhead were already edged with pink. Wind or no wind, it was morning, it was beautiful, and it was good to be alive. Then suddenly he was thinking of Warriner and Bellew somewhere in the eternal darkness and the ooze two miles below, and he swore softly as he tried to wrench his mind away. He knew that for years it would keep coming back, leaping out at him in odd moments and without warning to hit him with that unanswerable question: Would something different, some other way, have worked?

No. Nothing could have changed it. He’d done everything he could, and in the only way it could have been done. If he’d let Bellew’s deliberate provocation go unchallenged, any control he might have had over the situation and any chance he’d have had of saving all of them would have been gone forever. Once authority was lost, you never got it back. And with Bellew doing as he pleased, Warriner would have been doomed anyway. And at some other time, particularly if they were under way, he might not have been lucky enough to save Mrs. Warriner.

He took a look around the horizon for squalls and went back below. He made the weather entries in the log and wound the chronometer. Just as he finished pouring the water through for the coffee, he heard Rae whimper in her sleep. He set the tea kettle down and stepped swiftly over beside her bunk.

Her head was turning from side to side now, and the little cry of pain or of terror was growing in her throat. He dropped to his knees and put his arms about her and began to whisper softly in her ear. She jerked spasmodically, fighting the grip of his arms, and cried out once, but then she was awake. Her eyes were wide with terror, and then confused for a moment before she relaxed and all the tension went out of her. “Just hold me for a minute,” she said.

“It won’t last forever. You’ll quit dreaming about it.”

She nodded. “I know. But it may be a long time. The rest of it you could handle, but—oh, God, if only he hadn’t said that, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy—” Her chin began to quiver and she clenched her teeth to stop it, but tears welled up in her eyes.

“He tried to kill you,” Ingram said. “Does that help any?”

“No.”

“I guess it wouldn’t.” He was silent for a moment, and then he went on, “There’s not going to be much privacy on here till we get to Papeete, so I want to tell you this now, while I can. I love you.”

“That does.”

“Does what?”

She managed a smile. “Helps.”

He put his mouth down and whispered against her ear. “You’re the only one they ever made. Nobody else could have done it—”

“Never mind the junk about what I did. Just tell me again that you love me.”

He told her. Then he nodded toward the door into the forward compartment. “While I’m pouring your coffee, take a look in there and see if she’s all right.”

She rolled off the bunk, opened the door a crack, and peered in. She closed it and nodded. “Still sleeping quietly,” she whispered.

She dressed, and they took their coffee on deck to drink it. Ingram lit a cigar, and they watched the sun come up, neither of them saying anything. She started to tremble once as she looked down at the water, but got control of it. He went below to get the compass, to see what it was going to take to secure it in the binnacle, but when he was opening the drawer he heard Mrs. Warriner moving in the forward cabin. He stepped back up the ladder and motioned to Rae. She came down. “Take her something to put on,” he said quietly, “and a comb and whatever else she needs to fix herself up. Ill pour her some coffee and take it up on deck.”

It was several minutes before they came up. Mrs. Warriner was wrapped in Rae’s seersucker robe. Her hair was combed and there was a suggestion of lipstick on her mouth, but her eyes were dead and washed-out, and there were dark circles under them. Her movements were those of a sleepwalker as she sat down in the cockpit and accepted the cup of coffee. She said good morning and thanked him, but it was pure reflex, the ingrained and automatic good manners, and he realized she would have said the same thing if she’d been blind drunk or bleeding to death from a severed artery. But at least she hadn’t come running past him to try to jump overboard again. Maybe he was going to get through to her.

She took a sip of the coffee and accepted the cigarette Rae held out to her. “Thank you,” she said. She turned to Ingram. “Thank you for saving my life last night.” Same tone, he thought. Same inflection. They were of equal value.

He waited till she had finished the coffee, for what strength it could give her. He was sick of making speeches and dreaded it, but it had to be done.

“You heard what he said?” he asked then, abruptly, and apparently with complete callousness. Rae looked at him wonderingly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Warriner replied in the same flat tone. The pain showed in her eyes for only an instant and was replaced by that quality of deadness.

“I didn’t ask because I enjoy torturing people before breakfast,” Ingram went on. “I usually wait till later in the day. But what I’m driving at is that if you did hear him, you know by now it wasn’t you he was slamming the door on when he slugged Bellew and left the two of you to drown. It was his father—”

“Yes. Wait,” Rae broke in. “I don’t know why I didn’t remember it before.” She told them of Warriner’s strange reaction when she’d asked him if his father was still alive.

Ingram nodded. “So there you are,” he went on. “He didn’t blame you for anything. He didn’t think you betrayed him, and he didn’t think you deliberately went off and left him to drown. It’s just as I told you all along; he was already irrational and didn’t know what he was doing; he was confusing Bellew with his father. Probably nobody will ever know what his father did to him, but it was there in his subconscious all the time, and when his mind began to let go—” He gestured wearily. “God, I’m tired of sounding like a discount-house psychiatrist. But don’t you see, that was the reason he backed down from Bellew the way he did? When Bellew started bullying him and riding him, the old patterns began to come to the surface again. But I’ll get on to what I’m trying to say. You’re an adult, and you’ve probably got more sense than I have, and if you want to go on blaming yourself for something that was never any of your fault from first to last, that’s your affair. Aside from the fact that I like you and have a great deal of admiration for you, it’s none of my business at all.