Dead calm

much gas you figure you had aboard?”

Ingram continued to pump. “Maybe a hundred and fifty miles at normal cruising speed. Wide open, the way he left here, not much more than half of that—if he doesn’t burn the engine up first.”

“So call it a round hundred,” the man said. “It’s been a long time since I diddled around with the pi-r-square jazz, but won’t that work out to a good-sized piece of ocean?”

“Yeah,” Ingram replied. “With nothing else to go on, about thirty thousand square miles.”

“I had a hunch you couldn’t carry it around in a cup. And that’s not to mention the fact he’s not going to stop just because he runs out of gas. We get a breeze, he’ll probably get one too. The wind blows on the nutty as well as the beautiful and the pure in heart. Shakespeare. Or was it Salmon P. Chase?”

“I said with nothing else to go on,” Ingram pointed out curtly. “We know which way he left here, and it’s almost a cinch he’s headed for the Marquesas. That’s the reason I went up the mast, to see if he’d changed course. He hasn’t. And if we ever hope to make land, the Marquesas are the best chance we’ve got. So why not follow him? And see if we can keep this thing afloat? But don’t let me influence you, if you’ve got a better suggestion.”

The other shrugged. “Keep your hair on. I was just trying to estimate the chances. Not good, huh?”

“No,” Ingram said. He was about to mention that they had one advantage in that Warriner would have to sleep sometime, but bit it back. It presupposed his being alone on Saracen.

The man glanced up as if he’d read his thoughts. “There were just the two of you?”

Ingram nodded.

“Naturally, you never know what a creep’ll do, but she might have a chance. He likes a woman around to cry on.”

Ingram wanted desperately to reach for this ray of hope, but he’d never been good at self-deception. “And go into port somewhere with a witness?”

“Golden Boy’s not so hot at the long-range view. He might not think about that for days, especially with a nice bosom to throw himself on with his Kleenex.”

“Will you, for Christ’s sake, shut up?” the woman asked wearily.

Ingram glanced at her with curiosity, aware this was the first time he’d actually seen her since that first glance in the cabin, when his only impression had been that she was scared to death and appeared to be naked. Since he’d come back aboard he’d paid no attention to either of them except as to their potential value as tools or pieces of equipment in the matter of keeping this sodden tub afloat and following Saracen in it. She was probably in her late thirties, or perhaps even forty, but a strikingly handsome woman in spite of the disarray of her hair and the exhausted and sweat-streaked face. The hair itself was raven black except for a streak of gray, and the eyes were large and brown, but with more imperiousness than gentleness in them. She wore brief white shorts and a white halter which could have been a soiled gray and still appeared like snow against the tan of her body. Under other circumstances he might have noted that she had superb legs, but at the moment he was only wondering if she’d rested long enough to start pumping again. That, and what the hostility was between the two of them. Probably Warriner, he thought, remembering the way Rae had defended him. He seemed to have some fatal fascination for women older than himself. Rae was thirty-five. Then, for the first time, he remembered that presumably there’d been four people on here.

“What happened to Mrs. Warriner?” he asked.

The man grinned. “After marrying Hughie-boy, what could happen to anybody? It already has.”

The woman exhaled smoke and looked musingly at Ingram. “I’d like to correct the impression you seem to have that I’m married to this specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus. I’m Mrs. Warriner.”

He said nothing, but his surprise must have showed on his face, for she smiled a trifle wearily and said, “Yes, I am, aren’t I?”

“Momma likes ‘em young and mixed up,” the man said, and Ingram decided today probably wasn’t the first time he’d been slugged by somebody. Even people otherwise in full command of their faculties must have found the urge too much to resist.

He introduced himself and added, “We were bound from Florida to Papeete.”

“I’m very glad to know you, Mr. Ingram,” she said. “But sorry about the circumstances. This fringe-area human being is Mr. Bellew. If you’ve been wondering why my husband cracked up, perhaps the mystery is clearing. Just multiply your brief acquaintance by twenty-six days.”

But there was still the fourth one. “And Mrs. Bellew?”

Bellew turned toward Mrs. Warriner, his eyes bright. “Why don’t you tell him, honey? Nobody ever likes my version.”

“Estelle drowned,” she said. “Or was killed by a shark—”

“Or she was hit by a hockey puck, or some drunk in a sports car.” Bellew took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it between his knees into the water in the cabin. “Hughie-boy killed her.”

“That’s a lie!” Mrs. Warriner’s voice was under control, but Ingram could see the fury in her eyes.

“Oh, not deliberately, perish the thought.” Bellew looked at Ingram and made a deprecating gesture with his hands. “Hughie-dear wouldn’t even dream of killing anybody—unless she happened to be in the way when he was trying to save his precious neck. Naturally, you can’t have that sort of thing. What kind of world would it be without Hughie?”

“You were the one, if anybody was, you blind fool!” Mrs. Warriner started to get up, her self-control beginning to slip. “If you’d watched what you were doing—”

“Break it up!” Ingram’s command cut through the scene with a parade-ground bark that halted her. “Both of you! You can fight some other time, if there is one. Get back to work.”

With a venomous glance at Bellew, Mrs. Warriner took the pump. The other stood up and reached for the bucket. “And then Hughie hit this nasty old shark right on the nose, and he says you take that, you nasty old shark you. My wife can whip your wife.”

Mrs. Warriner started to turn, her face pale. Ingram caught her arm and wheeled her back to the pump. At the same time he barked at Bellew, “Shut up and start throwing water!”

Bellew looked at him with lazy insolence for a moment, as though on the point of refusing out of mere curiosity as to what would happen. Then he shrugged and dropped the bucket through the hatch. “You might have a point there, sport. Drowning makes an awful mess of my hair.”

Ingram returned to the hatch forward of the deckhouse, dropped the bucket, and began furiously throwing water overboard, conscious of the wasted minutes. What kind of madhouse was this? With the boat sinking under their feet, you had to tear them from each other’s throats and drive them to make them try to save themselves. Well, they’d pump, God damn them; they’d pump till they were standing on their tongues.

What had happened to the fourth one, Estelle Bellew? At the moment he didn’t care, but it was a way to keep from thinking of Rae. Didn’t they even know? How could one call it an accident and the other say Warriner had killed her? Warriner was fleeing from something, there was no doubt, from some terror that had pushed him over the edge into madness. Or was he only running from Bellew? If you were weak and unstable to begin with, twenty- six days of Bellew’s sadistic bullying and amused contempt would drive anybody around the bend. But why in the name of God had they ever started out together in the first place, to sail across the Pacific, four of them in an unsound boat? Well, they must have been friends then, friends and too lacking in experience to know what being cooped up on a small boat for weeks at a time could do to clashing personalities.

But it was futile. His thoughts always came back to the question from which there was no escape. What would Warriner do? But if he were insane, how could you even guess? Where did you start? Would he kill her or throw her overboard because she was a witness to the fact he’d gone off and left three people to drown on a sinking boat? Or worse, did he believe he’d killed Bellew? Presumably, he’d hit him from behind, and Bellew had fallen into the water, probably unconscious. Therefore Warriner might be convinced he was guilty of murder—in addition to whatever had happened to Estelle Bellew—and obviously there could be no turning back and no surviving witnesses. But this was assuming a mind at least partially capable of rational thought, of reasoning from cause to effect, from crime to punishment and how to escape it. Well, hadn’t he already shown he was capable of that? He’d made up that very clever and very plausible story about the deaths from botulism just to keep him, Ingram, from going aboard Orpheus and discovering what he’d done. The answer probably was that there wasn’t any answer, nothing ever clear-cut and definite; even the hopelessly psychotic must have rational intervals. Maybe at times he knew what he was doing, while at others he was completely cut off from reality.