Dead calm

in ambush just beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then she’s going down?”

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

“What’s causing it?” Bellew asked.

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

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

“Nothing except keep pumping.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who doesn’t?” Ingram asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is there a weapon of any kind aboard?”

He nodded. “A shotgun.”

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

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

“Is she aware that Orpheus is sinking?”

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

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