Dead calm

  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 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.

  Then what? Rae was no match for him physically; he was a powerfully built man in his early twenties. You could forget that. And there was no weapon— He stopped. The shotgun. It was a twelve-gauge double he’d brought along for hunting in Australia and New Zealand. But it was taken down, the barrels and stock wrapped separately in oiled sheepskin and stowed in a drawer where it could be sealed by customs in ports where it wasn’t permitted. She knew nothing about guns; could she even assemble and load it? No, that wasn’t the question. Could she use it? Could she deliberately shoot a man with it? And if she did, what would it do to her afterward? There was nothing pretty about the results of a shotgun blast at close range; she’d have nightmares the rest of her life and wake up screaming— Stop thinking about things you have no control over, he told himself. That’s out of your hands; just throw water and keep throwing it. It can’t be running in as fast as we’re dumping it out now; something’s got to give.

  It was less than thirty minutes later that two things happened almost at once. The first was a definite indication that they were gaining on the water: as it rushed from side to side with Orpheus’s rolling, the bucket would sometimes strike bottom and come up less than full. Maybe less than a foot deep in the cabins now, he thought, if she were on an even keel; they’d thrown out probably that much in an hour and a half of furious pumping and bailing. The other thing was a breeze.

  He’d been so intent on bailing, his first awareness of it was the cool feel on his face. He looked up. It was straight out of the west, and as far as he could see the surface of the sea was wrinkled and dark. “Wind,” Mrs. Warriner called out at the same moment.

  “Right,” he said. “Just keep pumping; you can take the wheel in a minute.” He dropped the bucket and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail, working feverishly and praying the wind would last. He freed the end of the boom, took a strain on it with the topping lift, and reshackled the halyard to the head of the sail. He hoisted it, tightened it down with the winch, and started on the double for the jib. Then he turned and called back to the other two, “Have you got a genoa aboard?” No doubt he’d regret it by the time he’d manhandled it from one side to the other a dozen times or so in these fluky airs, but every foot of distance was precious. A genoa would add almost the equivalent of another mainsail to her, and it was going to take all the canvas they could get on her to move this hulk in anything short of a gale.

  It was Mrs. Warriner who replied, “Yes, there’s a genoa, and also a big nylon spinnaker. The sail locker’s forward. Do you want me to show you?”

  “No. I’ll get it.” There was a hatchway to the forward cabin.

  He opened it and hurried down the ladder. The light was dim below deck, the air stifling and saturated with moisture, and water washed back and forth around his legs. In back of the ladder was a doorway opening into the locker in the bows of the boat. The sailbags were stowed in a bin on the port side, some six or eight of them altogether. He began muscling them out and looking at the markings on the sides. There were spare mainsails and mizzens, a couple of jibs, a storm trysail, a spinnaker, and the genoa jib. He looked at this young fortune in sails and wished they’d bought a hull to go with them. He beefed the genoa back up the ladder, dumped it in the bow, and began unhanking the smaller jib. The breeze was still cool against his sweaty face, and Orpheus had begun to come ponderously up into the wind, still rolling heavily. He got the genoa snapped onto the stay, shackled the halyard to its head, and hoisted it. He didn’t know where the sheet was, but grabbed up one of the lines littering the deck, made it fast to the clew, led it out around the port shrouds, through the block on the port side of the deck aft of midships, and back to the winch near the cockpit. Orpheus swung off to starboard. The mainsail filled, with the genoa aback and blown in against the shrouds. She began to move slowly ahead. When she had steerageway, he brought the wheel hard over; she came slowly up into the wind and fell off on the starboard tack with both the mainsail and genoa full and drawing. He checked the compass. They were heading 220. He came right a little and re-trimmed the sheets, but 225 was the best they could do. It wasn’t too far from the course they wanted.

  He called out to Mrs. Warriner, “You take the wheel now. Bellew can relieve you there at the pump.”

  She came aft. Bellew moved to the pump, for once without comment. Ingram broke out the mizzen and hoisted it. The breeze had continued to freshen, and now tiny whitecaps were winking on the broad undulations of the swell. During all this burst of furious activity and the excitement of getting under way, the fear had been pushed to the back of his mind, but now as he looked over the side it all came back with a rush, along with a galling and futile anger. Were they moving at all? With the same breeze Saracen would have been footing along at four or five knots, but this sodden coffin had little more than steerageway.

  “Let me take her again for a minute,” he said to Mrs. Warriner. Maybe they were pinching her, trying to point higher into the wind than she would sail. She relinquished the wheel. He came left ten degrees, started the sheets, retrimmed them, tried her farther off the wind, and came back. It was no use. She had no feel of life to her anywhere, no desire to move; she answered the helm with the leaden apathy of a dying animal that no longer wanted anything but rest.

  He hadn’t expected much, but this was even worse. If you could manufacture your own wind to order, by direction and force, you couldn’t make fifty miles a day. He came back to the original course, turned the wheel over to Mrs. Warriner, stepped over to the rail, and looked down. Below the water-line streamers of green hair wove backward with their passage. With ten to
twenty tons of water inside her and that pasture on the bottom, he thought, how could you expect anything to move her? “When was the last time she was hauled out?” he asked Mrs. Warriner.

  “About eight months ago,” she replied. “When we bought her.”

  Well, that figured; it matched everything else about this expedition. He stepped down into the doghouse and dug a chart of the South Pacific out of the litter on the deck. Even if they weren’t going anywhere, they had to have a position, a point of departure. Their last position should be in the logbook, but he didn’t trust their navigation. He’d had a good fix from three star sights just at dusk last night; from that, by dead reckoning, they’d made twenty-five miles along a course of 235 degrees. That should be Saracen’s position at dawn when he’d sighted Orpheus. She was—call it five miles away, on a bearing of 315. That would put her here.

  He penciled a cross on the chart: 4.20 South latitude, 123.30 West longitude. The Marquesas were roughly twelve hundred miles to the west southwest, the Galapagos over two thousand miles behind them, and elsewhere nothing but thousands of miles of empty ocean. The chances of their being sighted by a ship were to all practical purposes nonexistent.

  And as for ever catching up with Saracen, even if they could find her … Face it, he thought. She was already far over the horizon, making six knots under power. And when her fuel ran out, she could still outsail this waterlogged hulk with nothing but her mizzen and somebody’s shirt.

  “The wind’s heading us,” Mrs. Warriner called out from the cockpit. He went back on deck. The breeze had veered around to the southwest, and she had bare steerageway on a course that was now a little east of south.

  “We’ll come about,” he said. He cast off the genoa sheet, carried the sail forward around the stay and outside the starboard shrouds, and trimmed the sheet on the port tack. They were steering 275 now, which was 35 degrees to the west of the course they wanted. But in a few minutes the wind went further around to the southward and they were able to come down to 245. Then it died out momentarily and sprang up again out of the northwest. He carried the genoa around again. Ten minutes later the wind began to soften once more, and then died with complete finality. Orpheus slogged forward a few feet, came to rest, and began to roll heavily in the trough. He looked around the horizon. In every direction the surface of the ocean had the slick, hot glare of polished steel.