Dead calm

threw the bandswitch and retuned the antenna control.

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

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

9

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

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

10:14 AM  226 degrees Est. speed 6 knots

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

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

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

How was she going to get control of it?

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

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

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

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

Then what?

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

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

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

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

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

Sometime around sunset this evening they would pass the point of no return. After that, they would have