fuzz on the blankets. In which case, alternative number two would win by default, and John would drown anyway.
Was that all?
No. There was still one other possibility. At the moment her nerves snapped she might run out and attack Warriner with the marlinspike or with her bare hands. The result of that was foregone.
Then she had to kill Warriner, and she had to do it before just thinking of it drove her out of her mind.
No. She sat down on one of the sailbags with her hands pressed against her temples. Nothing in life could ever be reduced to as simple terms as that. There had to be some other way out of the corner.
Well, where was it? Try them all again.
Hit him with something? He was suspicious of her now, and she couldn’t get behind him. And again you ran into the same old limiting factor; you’d get only one blow, and if that didn’t work you were dead, and so was John.
Try once more to reason with him? After what had just happened? You could carry on long conversations with him on any subject in the world, except one. At the mere mention of going back, he retreated into his madness and pulled up the bridge.
Well, maybe John wouldn’t drown; maybe
But at least she could try the radio again. She slid back the bolt and went out, carrying the marlinspike. If he started down the ladder she could throw it at his legs to be sure of getting back in time. She called and listened alternately on both the intership frequencies. There was no answer, no sound except the eternal crackling of the static. At the end of twenty minutes she knew she no longer had any hope of one, that she was only putting off the thing she had to face. She switched it off and went back. Very carefully and precisely she noted the heading on the compass and wrote it down on the scratch pad along with the time.
It looked neat and businesslike. And there was the illusion she was doing something.
They hit her then from opposite sides, or rather she ran headlong into the second while she was recoiling from the first. The first, of course, was John. He was in the water, drowning, as the sun went down. She leaned forward with her face pressed against the scratch pad on her knees, her eyes tightly closed and then opened again because it was more clearly seen and more terrible with them closed. Then it was gone, as if an automatic projector were changing slides, and she saw the thing that would be there in the cockpit when the shotgun had done its work.
She’d never in her life shot anything with a gun of any kind, but her father and two older brothers had been hunters of quail, and inevitably she had seen a few examples of the mess that resulted when a bird was shot too close under the gun. She had no illusions as to what would be up there. She swallowed, fighting the nausea pushing up into her throat.
Seven hours?
Maybe she could merely frighten him with the gun, point it at him the way they did on television, and say, “All right, Hughie, turn around and go back.” This, she knew in her heart, was idiocy comparable to that other cliche of the private eyes and western marshals, the immaculate and neatly packaged death by gunshot wound that never hurt, either the shooter or the shot, but she gathered it to her for a moment in the desperation of her need for some other way out of the corner. Granted there didn’t seem to be much likelihood of scaring a man who was already insane from fear, you could at least examine it and try to figure out what would happen.
You had to assume two things, she thought. The first was that Hughie was capable of evaluating two different fears and making a conscious choice of the lesser. Could he? Probably, at least part of the time, but at any specific moment it would be as unpredictable as tossing a coin. The second was that a quaking matron with a gun would be more fearsome than the irrational horror that had already taken possession of his mind. No. Certainly not. The things in the darkness beyond the firelight were always more terrible than the ones that you could see. He’d either pay no attention to the gun at all, or at the mere mention of going back he’d go berserk and charge straight at her.
But it was still worth trying, wasn’t it? Even if there was only one chance in a thousand she could bluff him into going back and could control him all the way there without actually having to shoot, at least there would be that one. No. She saw the stupidity of it. Trying to bluff a man she couldn’t bluff, with a gun she hoped she wouldn’t have to use, was nothing short of suicide. In that second when she was still hysterically voicing threats and praying he would stop before she had to shoot, it would be too late to shoot, even if she could, and he’d have the gun away from her and he’d kill her. If she took it up that ladder at all and committed herself, it had to be with the hundred- per-cent certainty she was prepared to use it. And that she didn’t have.
Why not? It was Warriner, wasn’t it, who’d backed her into this corner from which there was no other exit?
Legally there was no question of her right to do so. There would be a hearing, somewhere and sometime, at which she would have to testify as to the circumstances, but that was all. She wouldn’t be charged with anything, and nobody would attach any blame to her. Then it was simply because of all those nights she’d wake up screaming, and the fact that until the day she died her mind would never emerge completely from the shadow of that unanswered question: could there have been some other way?
So in the end it boiled down to a simple act of purchase, didn’t it? If she had no illusions about the price or about the fact she would have to pay it, the terms were clear and understood. For John’s life she gave up her peace of mind for the rest of her own. Why not? People gave up their lives themselves for others, didn’t they? This was the opposite of heroic, and the act itself was abhorrent, but the same love was involved, the same willingness to pay.
She realized then there was no sense to any of these arguments. You couldn’t rationalize killing a man with a shotgun, and you didn’t arrive at the deed by any process of thought, of weighing the advantages and disadvantages. If you did it at all, it was after you’d quit thinking, in desperation, when nothing else was left.
And, anyway, she probably couldn’t even assemble the gun. John had never done it since it had been aboard, and it had been nearly twenty years since she’d seen her father do it. And it could be a different kind, or a later model. Guns must change over the years, the way cars did, didn’t they? Of course they did.
But there were only two pieces.
No, it was just her impression there were only two pieces. There might be more. She’d never counted them, had she?
Well, if she found out she couldn’t assemble it, that would settle it, and the torture would stop.
Then, without even knowing how she’d got there, she was kneeling beside the bunk in the after cabin, pulling out the drawer. There were only two rolls of the fleece, one long one and another shorter and bulkier. She ran back into the forward cabin with them and bolted the door. She put them on the bunk and began untying the cords that bound them.
There were three pieces.
The long roll contained only the barrels, the twin dark tubes fixed side by side, but the other held two pieces. One was the part that went against your shoulder—the stock, she thought it was called—with the lever for breaking it open to put in the shells, and the trigger guard and the triggers. The other piece was a hand-grip sort of thing she seemed to remember went under the barrels just in front of the stock. It was mostly of wood, rounded on the sides and bottom, tapering at one end and fitted with a concave piece of steel at the other. She had no idea how it was supposed to be attached to the barrels.
The barrels themselves had a projection at one end, on the bottom, that must fit into something in the metal part at the front end of the stock. She took them in one hand and the stock in the other and began trying to match them. Yes, there it was. They went together, and formed a hinge. She swung the barrels up, and they locked in place.
But there was still the third part. And it was obvious it was the wrong piece for this kind of gun, or that
