Dead calm

working at once. Somebody had to sleep, and if they ever got a breeze one had to be at the wheel.

There was something else that had to be done, too, within the next few minutes. He straightened, looking down toward the southwest. There was no trace now of Saracen; she was gone over the horizon. He reached up and unshackled the halyard from the head of the mainsail and made a sling from what was left of the line they’d brought up, leaving a free end about four feet long. He shackled the sling to the end of the halyard, retrieved the binoculars, and slung them about his neck.

I’ll need both of you for a few minutes,” he called out to the man. They came forward. “Think you can hoist me to the top of the mast?”

“Sure.” The other looked up at the spar swinging its dizzy arc across the sky. “Better you than me.”

“Why not me?” the woman asked. “I’m the lightest.”

Ingram shook his head. “It’s not easy. If you lost the mast it’d beat you to jelly before we could get you down.”

He didn’t like the prospect himself, with Orpheus rolling her rails under and two people he didn’t know on the other end of the line, but there was no help for it. He loosed the halyard fall from the pin on the forward side of the mast. “Keep a turn around the pin,” he said. “And take it slow. When I get up to the spreaders I’ll tell you when to stop and when to heave.”

He climbed atop the boom, stepped into the sling, took a turn around the mast with the free end of the line, and made it fast to the shackle. “Okay. Hoist away.” The halyard came taut, with his weight suspended in the sling, and he began to move upward in short jerks, two or three feet at a time, with his legs locked around it while he pulled upward with his arms. The first twenty feet were not too bad, but as he continued to mount his arc increased, both in distance and in velocity, with the resultant snap at the end more abrupt and punishing. He reached the spreaders, the horizontal members extending out at right angles to the mast. This was the dangerous part. He had to cast off his safety belt momentarily in order to pass it around the mast above them.

“Hold it a minute,” he called out. With both legs and one arm locked around the mast, he worked at the knot with his free hand. It came loose. If he lost his grip now he’d swing out and then back against the mast with enough force to break his skull. The mast swung down to starboard, snapped abruptly at the end, and came back. His arms and legs were slick with sweat, almost frictionless against the varnished surface. He changed arms, caught the dangling piece of line with his right hand, passed it up over the spreader and around the mast. Gripping the mast with his right arm again, he made the end of the line fast once more to the shackle with his left hand, working solely by feel.

“Up easy,” he called out. “Slow. About two feet.”

He came up, got one leg across the spreader, and then the other. “Okay, hoist away.” He went on up. Three feet from the masthead light and the blocks at the top of the mast, he called out, “That’ll do. Make it fast.” He hoped they knew how.

This was no place for a queasy stomach, he thought. It was like riding a bucking horse making forty feet at a bound. While he was groping for the binoculars he looked down at the deck sixty feet below. Most of the time he was out over the water; he crossed the deck only through the vertical sector of his swing from one side to the other. The centrifugal force at the end of the roll when the mast stopped abruptly and started back felt as if it were going to tear him loose and hurl him outward like a projectile from a catapult.

He brought the binoculars up with both arms wrapped about the mast, and swept them along the line of the horizon off to port. At first he was afraid he’d waited too long. Then his pulse leaped. There she was, a minute sliver of white poised just over the rim of the world.

“If you’re made fast down there,” he called out, “one of you give me the heading.”

“We can’t see her from down here,” the man yelled back.

“No. I mean our heading. How are we lying?”

The woman went aft and peered into the binnacle. “Two-nine-oh,” she shouted up at him.

He looked down at the deck, estimating the angle on the bow. Call it four points, he thought. Forty-five from two-ninety left two-forty-five. Saracen’s bearing had remained practically unchanged from the first. Warriner was apparently headed for the Marquesas.

If he had thought to fool them by changing course after he was over the horizon, the chances were he would have already done it. Orpheus, with her bare masts, had long since dropped from sight from over there, and he’d probably assume he was equally invisible. Or would he? Just because he was unbalanced or mentally sick didn’t mean he had to be stupid. Witness that story he’d made up about the deaths from botulism.

He put the glasses back to his eyes. The little point of white thinned and disappeared, then came up again. Was she still on there? What was happening now, or had happened already? He closed his eyes for an instant and prayed. When he opened them and looked through the glasses again, Saracen was gone over the curvature of the earth. He looked around at the slickly heaving, empty miles of the equatorial Pacific shimmering under the sun without even the suspicion of a breeze and felt sick. Automatically he glanced at his watch to note the time. It was 9:50.

5

Far to the northward a squall flickered and rumbled along the horizon, but here they appeared to hang suspended in a vacuum while the sun beat down and the oily groundswell rolled endlessly up from the south. The air was like warm damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated, unmoving.

Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of insects crawling across the skin. It ran down into his already sodden and clinging shorts and dripped into his sneakers. His back ached from crouching under the boom.

Dip, lift, throw—it went on without stop. The man was working silently above the after cabin, throwing water with a machine-like regularity now that matched his own, and he could hear the steady stream from the pump. It had been an hour and ten minutes since he’d come down from the mast. They’d thrown out nine to ten tons of water, at least, and still the buckets came up full. He’d made no attempt to get a sounding before they started; it was unnecessary. The problem was too elementary to need any measurements—either they got the water out of those cabins this way within a few hours or they were done. If it continued to rise, or even if it remained at the same level, they had no chance, because they obviously couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. And whenever they stopped to sleep or collapsed from exhaustion, she’d go down.

He was dehydrated, and the ropy saliva inside his mouth tasted like brass. He wondered if they had fresh water that wasn’t contaminated, and then remembered Warriner hadn’t been suffering from thirst. Straightening, he looked aft. The woman was tiring; it was evident in the strained and set expression of her face. And the man, though there’d been no word of complaint, was in pain from the blow on his head. It showed in his eyes, below the level of that hard-boiled and half-contemptuous amusement with which he seemed to regard everything that happened.

He walked aft and took the pump handle. “Better take five,” he said. “And get a drink. It’s not going to help things if you keel over.” He turned to the man. “You too.”

“I’ll bring some water,” she said and went below. Ingram bent to the pump. In a moment she came back, carrying a saucepan full of water and a cup and a pack of cigarettes. She set the water on top of the doghouse, lit one of the cigarettes, and sat down on deck with her feet on the steps of the doghouse hatch. There was no protection anywhere on deck from the brutal weight of the sun, and the trapped air below would be stifling. The man took a drink and sat down on deck with his legs dangling in the hatch where he’d been working. After he’d had a cup of the water himself, Ingram went on pumping, driven by the compulsion to hurry, to do something, anything, and by fear of his thoughts if he stopped.

“How about one of your cigarettes, honey?” the man asked.

The woman tossed them toward him silently, without even looking at him. He lit one and asked Ingram, “How