And the deep blue sea

was dry and full of the taste of copper. His hands were on the inflated rim of the raft, pushing it ahead of him as he swam. The dungarees and shirt were inside the raft, and he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. Normally, he had no particular fear of sharks, but he knew that what he was doing was tantamount to asking to be cut in two, threshing on the surface at night like something wounded and helpless. Well, if one took his legs off, it would be over in a few minutes at most; that beat the other program, the thirst.

Between the lash of urgency and the gray sea of fatigue that was engulfing him, he was conscious of random and disconnected thoughts that made him wonder again if he were entirely rational. There was a haunting impression of deja vu about the whole thing that baffled him, since neither he nor anybody else in maritime history, as far as he knew, had ever been rescued by swimming over to a stationary ship in mid-ocean and asking for a lift. Ahoy aboard the freighter! You going my way? He giggled, and his fright at this was sufficient to clear his mind momentarily.

He knew then when he had done this before. It was at the hospital after the highway patrol had got Gerry out of the wreckage of the Porsche and called him at the studio, and he had sat in a small room at Emergency with his whole being concentrated like a laser beam into a single state of wanting, of trying to control with an effort of will something that was out of his hands. When the intern and resident had come out and told him she was dead, he had known he would never want anything again. It was all used up. But apparently there was always a little left somewhere, because this was the same thing again. Either the ship would remain there motionless in the water until he reached it, or it wouldn’t. They couldn’t see him in the darkness, and he had no way to signal it.

Three hundred yards. Two hundred. He could see the silhouette of the stowed booms now, and one of the lighted portholes winked off momentarily as though somebody had walked in front of it, but it was still too far and too dark to make out any movement on deck or on the bridge. He tried to increase the beat of his scissoring legs, but he was too near complete collapse. He sobbed for breath. Then, almost as clearly as though he were aboard, he heard the ding, ding, pause, ding, ding, of four bells from the wheelhouse, repeated a moment later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. The lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he thought. Just a few more minutes. Then there was another sound, the ringing of a telephone, and he felt the hackles lift on his neck. Engine room calling the bridge? He kicked ahead.

It was less than a hundred yards now. Then he heard the sound that struck terror in his heart, the jingle of the engine room telegraph. He tried to shout, but he had no breath. A great boil of water appeared under her counter, and he could hear the massive vibration set up by the engine going full ahead while she was still lying dead in the water. He clawed his way onto the raft and stood on his knees, fighting for breath so he could scream at them. They couldn’t hear him over the vibration. She began to move. He shouted, endlessly now, feeling himself engulfed in madness. She gathered way, beginning to swing to his right to get back on course, and her counter went past. Turbulence from the propeller spread outward, rocking the raft and spinning it around as she drew away from him in the night.

* * *

The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead. Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upwards from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran towards the bridge The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.

‘A man!’ she cried out, pointing. ‘There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.’

He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. ‘Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!’ But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.

‘Captain! Stop! Back up!’ She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?

‘What is it, Mrs. Brooke?’ he asked.

‘She says she saw a man on a raft,’ the second mate said.

She saw the exchanged glance. Passengers! The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. ‘Back there!’ she cried out again, gesturing. ‘He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!’

The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, ‘It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.’

‘Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?’

‘Not on our radar.’ It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. ‘Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.’ Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He ripped the canister loose from its supports and threw the whole thing over the side. Karen heard it splash in the water below them, and in a moment a torchlike flame appeared, lighting up the surface of the sea as it began to drop astern. The chief mate turned and called out to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse. ‘Hard left!’

‘Mr. Lind!’ the captain said angrily, drowning out the helmsman’s reply. It was obvious even to Karen that Lind had vastly exceeded his authority, since it wasn’t his watch and the captain was on the bridge besides, but the big man was completely at ease.

He winked at Karen. ‘Cap, it’ll cost us ten minutes to find out. If there’s nobody there, I’ll buy the company a new life ring, and Mrs. Brooke will give a cocktail party.’

The ship was already beginning to swing. The captain started to countermand the order, then shrugged and remained silent. Karen sighed with relief as she retreated from the bridge where she had no business. Lind, she thought, was something of a man.

And with a mocking and reckless sense of humor that could have wrecked it, she added to herself, thinking of the ‘cocktail party’. Captain Steen was a Baptist, a teetotaler, and a dedicated crusader against alcohol. She crossed to the port side of the boat deck where she could continue to watch the flare after they completed the turn, trying to sort out her reactions to the odd fact that she had probably saved a man’s life. What was that old Chinese belief? That if you saved somebody’s life you had meddled in his destiny and you were responsible for him from then on?

* * *

Goddard saw the flame blossom on the surface of the sea, and collapsed, shaking all over and too weak to do anything for a moment. He saw the ship begin to swing in her hard-over turn, circling to come back through the area, and when he had his breath back he slipped over the side again and began to push the raft toward the circle of light, some two hundred yards away. By the time he came up to it the ship had already reached the limit of her opposite course and was turning toward him again. He stopped in the edge of the illuminated area with the raft between the flare and the oncoming ship so he would be silhouetted against it, and climbed back aboard. He waved, knowing they would have their glasses on the light and would have seen him by now. Lying on his back, he fought his way into the soggy dungarees. He sat up, drank the last of the water in the bottle, and waited.

The ship came on. While still a quarter mile away they backed down briefly on the engine to take most of the way off her there, before they came abreast, so the wash from the propeller wouldn’t sweep him away from her. The engine stopped, and she began to drift slowly down on him, coming to rest at last not more than fifty yards away. He saw men working on the boat deck, and one of the starboard boats started to swing out in its davits. They didn’t know what kind of shape he might be in, or whether there could be somebody else lying in the bottom of the raft.

He cupped his hands. ‘Don’t lower a boat! Just a ladder!’

A voice came back from the darkness of the bridge. ‘You sure? How about the accommodation ladder?’