Dead calm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Her face hurt. It was lying on something hard that went up and down and wove back and forth the way the floor had the only time in her life she’d ever been drunk, and there was that same sick feeling in her stomach. Somewhere a long way off there was an engine sort of noise that seemed to have been going on forever, and just audible above it, or through it, a voice was singing. It was an old, very sentimental popular song, one she hadn’t heard for years, but it was still familiar. What was it? Oh. “Charmaine.” That was it. She rolled over. Some powerful light glared beyond her closed eyelids, and she grasped that it was sunlight. She opened them and squinted with pain. Just beyond her was a pair of wide and very sun-tanned shoulders surmounted by a gold-thatched head. At the same moment the head turned, still singing, and Hughie Warriner regarded her with concern, which gave way to