Dead calm

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