Authors: Charles Williams
It rode like a chip on the oily groundswell, and reflected sunlight glared in his face as he shipped the oars and began pulling toward the other yacht. As he drew nearer, he could see the sails were sloppily furled and that the deck was littered with an unseamanlike mess of uncoiled and unstowed lines. The main boom rested on its gallows frame, but the mizzen swung forlornly back and forth, banging against its slackened sheets. She was at least six inches below her normal waterline, he thought, and her movements were heavy and sluggish, like those of a dying animal, as she lurched over and back under the punishing rays of the sun. He felt sorry for her, as he always did for a boat in trouble. He changed course slightly to pass under her stern and come up on her starboard side. Her name and home port were spelled out in ornate black letters edged with gilt against the white paint of her transom.
Orpheus
SANTA BARBARA
He was still some twenty yards away, rounding her stern, when he heard a crash from somewhere inside the hull, followed in a moment by another. Apparently something had come adrift, a drawer or a locker, and was slamming back and forth on the water inside her. He pulled quickly up along the starboard side and, as she rolled down on the swell, caught one of the lifeline stanchions. After shipping the oars, he gathered up the painter and stepped on deck. He was near amidships, opposite the doghouse. As he made the painter fast he could hear the flow and splash of water inside her hull, sweeping from side to side as she rolled. He didn’t like the feel of her under his feet. Better make it short, he thought.
Aft of the doghouse was a slightly raised deck, enclosed by a low railing, which extended back almost to the mizzen-mast and the helmsman’s cockpit. There was a skylight in the center of this, apparently above the after cabin. It was closed and secured. He stepped aft, feeling her unsteady lurch as she rolled, ducked under the main boom, and looked into the doghouse hatch. There were only four steps leading down, since the top of it was quite high above the deck outside. There was no water here, but the deck was covered with a litter of charts and scratch pads and pencils from a drawer that had slid out of the chart table on the starboard side. He came on down the steps and looked quickly around. The port side and that part of the starboard side forward of the chart table were taken up with settees covered with some white plastic material. On racks above the chart table were a radiotelephone and radio direction-finder.
Aft, beside the steps leading up on deck, was a low doorway, and amidships at the forward end was another. The latter was open. He stepped over to it and peered through. Steps led downward to the main cabin, which was in ruin. At the after end, on the port side, were a sink, stove, refrigerator, and stowage cupboards, while to starboard was a table surrounded on two sides by a leather-covered settee. Everything was drowned, and the cabin was filled with the dank odor of wetness and decay. Water at least two feet deep swirled back and forth, crashing into the stove and refrigerator and settee and dripping from the bulkheads and ceiling, all intermingled with rolling cans from some burst locker, sodden articles of clothing, and books from an emptied bookshelf. It was sickening. At the forward end was a doorway which probably opened into a lavatory, and to the left of it a curtained passage to the forward cabin. He stepped down and splashed through the swirling debris to the passage and peered in. The two bunks were rumpled and dripping, and water rocked back and forth between them. It was just as Warriner had said. He wondered what he was looking for.
He turned and hurried back to the doghouse. Through the windows he caught a quick glimpse of
Saracen
gracefully riding the groundswell two hundred yards away, still becalmed. The mere sight of her was comforting after the ruin below. The door at the aft end of the doghouse was closed and secured with a hasp, through the staple of which a pair of dividers had been dropped. He pulled the dividers out, and as he turned to toss them on the chart table his eye fell on the ship’s log, behind a clip on the bulkhead above it. He frowned, puzzled. Warriner had apparently been telling the truth otherwise, so why had he lied about that? He’d said the logbook was pulp, sloshing around in the bilges. And that the radio and chronometer and sextant were all ruined. Nothing up here was wet at all. And as water rose in the cabins below, wouldn’t he have brought his passport and money and other valuables up here where they’d stay dry? It would be the natural thing to do. They might be in one of the other drawers of the chart table. Well, he’d look for them in a minute. He pushed open the door and peered down into the after cabin.
A dark-haired woman who appeared at first glance to be completely nude was huddled on the far end of the right-hand bunk, her back against the bulkhead at the foot of it and her legs drawn up under her chin as if to get as far as possible from the door. One hand was up to her mouth and her eyes were wide with fear, which changed to amazement and disbelief as she stared into his face. She cried out, “Stop! Stop, it’s not him!” And in the same fraction of a second Ingram saw the other one reflected in the panel mirror mounted on the after bulkhead between the bunks. A man was standing just below him, to the left of the steps leading down, a big man, naked from the waist up, with a broad, beard-stubbled face smeared pink with diluted blood running down from a wound somewhere in the sodden mess of his hair. In his upraised hand was a billet of wood, apparently the end of a drawer he’d pulled from under one of the bunks and smashed. He’d been poised to bring it down on Ingram’s head, and when the girl’s piercing outcry stopped him he tried to recover. At the same moment
Orpheus
lurched over to starboard, and he fell into the water washing back and forth across the cabin sole. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the water with his back against the other bunk, brushed a hand across his bloody face, and looked up at Ingram with a hard and bitter grip.
“Welcome to Happy Valley,” he said. “Where’s the All-American psycho?”
“Get on deck!” Ingram snapped. “Ill be back.” He whirled and plunged up the steps into the open, ducked under the main boom, and dropped into the dinghy. His hands fumbled as he loosed the painter. Two explosive strokes with the oars brought him into the clear past
Orpheus’s
stern, where he could see across to
Saracen
. Her position was unchanged except that she had swung around and was lying broadside to.
Rae was alone in the cockpit.
He breathed softly and dug in the oars, feeling sweat begin to run down into his eyes. He came up the broad slope of a swell and ran down the other side like some frenzied, two-legged waterbeetle in flight for its life. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all right. There’s no reason the crazy son of a bitch would wake up. Then, across a hundred and fifty yards of open water, he heard the growl of the starter. Rae was coming to pick him up.
He tried to signal to her. At the risk of capsizing, he stood up in the dinghy and frantically sliced the air in horizontal sweeps of his opened hands, but she was bent over the controls now and didn’t see. The starter growled again, and this time the engine started with a coughing backfire that spread gooseflesh between his shoulderblades. One of his oars started to slide overboard. He grabbed it and dropped to the seat again. Muscles writhed across his back as he dug them in and lunged, flinging the dinghy up the side of the swell. He was to blame. She’d been watching with the glasses and had seen the way he’d exploded out of the doghouse and run across the deck, and, knowing only that there was something urgent about his getting back, was trying to help.
Saracen
was swinging now, under way and foreshortened as she began to bear down upon him. The gap was only a hundred yards, and closing. Some of the fear began to leave him. It was going to be all right. He heard her cut back the throttle and drop the engine out of gear. Then when he turned his head again he felt himself grow cold all over. There was a spot of golden color just to the left of the lined-up masts. It was Warriner’s head. He was standing on the companion ladder, looking aft.
Nothing seemed to move. There was a piercing clarity about every detail of the scene—the foreshortened hull pointed toward him, the little curl of bow wave under her forefoot, the tall spires of
Orion
achingly white against the sky, and just this side of Rae’s face that spot of gold like a medallion poised on edge above the cambered top of the deckhouse—but the whole thing was frozen like a single frame of motion-picture film with the projector jammed.
Saracen
was seventy-five yards away, with Warriner’s head just beginning to turn. A few seconds either way could decide it, but they were something over which he no longer had any control.
Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he actually had forgotten the people he’d locked in there to drown. Or if he’d really been asleep, maybe his reaction time would be off just enough to make the difference— The film jerked then, between the down-thrust oars and the stroke, and the projector began to run. Warriner’s head swung on around, and he saw the dinghy and the sinking
Orpheus
beyond. He leaped the rest of the way into the cockpit, and his figure merged with Rae’s.
Ingram heard the engine race, still out of gear. It slowed and came back up again almost in the same instant, with the load on it now. Which way would he turn? At the risk of a fraction of a second’s raggedness in the beat of the oars, he had to turn his head and look.
Saracen
loomed over him less than four lengths away, the gap closing faster now as she gathered speed, but she was already beginning to swing to starboard. He dug in his left oar and spun the dinghy around almost at right angles to cut across her course.
Saracen,
in a hard-over right turn, was on his left now. He could see Rae fighting to reach the ignition switch. Warriner, holding the wheel with one hand, threw her back. She fell to her knees on the short section of deck aft of the cockpit, but sprang up and flung herself on him again. Ingram’s eyes stung with sweat, and the oars were bending as he threw the dinghy forward. The engine roared at full throttle;
Saracen’s
bow was swinging off faster now than he was gaining, but the stern was still coming down toward him. Twenty yards … fifteen … The locked and struggling figures in the cockpit suddenly burst apart. Warriner’s fist swung, and Ingram saw her fall. She lay in a crumpled heap on the afterdeck, unmoving, one arm dangling over the stern as if she were calling out for help. Ten yards … four … three … The turn was completed now, and the stern was beginning to draw away from him. He gave one more desperate heave on the oars, stood up, and flung himself at the rail. The dinghy kicked backward under him. His outstretched hands were two feet short, and then he was in the churning white water under the quarter.
He was already behind the propeller, or he might have lost an arm. He felt the solid kick of the water thrown back from it whirl him over, and then his head was above surface and
Saracen’s
stern was ten yards away. It dipped as her bow rose to an oncoming swell, and for an instant he could see Rae’s figure face down on the afterdeck, her hair very dark against the bleached and weathered teak. “Jump!” he yelled. “Jump! Get off!” She lay motionless.
For the first time in his life at sea he completely lost his head. It lasted for only a moment, and when he realized what he was doing, that he was threshing madly at the water, trying to swim after
Saracen’s
receding stern, he got control of the panic inside him and brought himself up. Lifting his face above water, he roared out once more with all his remaining breath, “Jump, Rae! Jump!” The limp and dangling arm was his only answer. She was either badly hurt or unconscious.
The dinghy was behind him. Both oars had slipped overboard. He found them, threw them back in, and lifted himself in over the transom. He was more scared than he had ever been in his life, and the whole scene came to him through the winy haze of a desire to get his hands on Warriner and kill him, but there was no time to give way to futile emotion. He whirled the dinghy about and sent it racing across the two hundred yards of open water toward
Orpheus,
trying not even to think except of what he had to do, as if it were an exercise.
Saracen
was going straight away, and he could still see Rae’s figure on the stern.
He turned his head. The man and woman had come on deck and were standing just aft of the doghouse, watching him. He shot the dinghy across the few remaining yards, slammed into
Orpheus’s
port side, and pulled in the oars. Neither of them had made a move to take the painter. He grabbed it himself, leaped on deck, and made it fast. “Have you got any glasses?” he asked.
The man grinned bleakly. “You didn’t seem to do any better than we did. Maybe you have to be crazy yourself to outguess him.”
Ingram caught himself just short of smashing him in the face—not because the man was already hurt or because he was probably in no way to blame, but merely because it would waste time. “Binoculars?” he asked again. “Where are they?”
The man jerked a thumb toward the doghouse. “Rack, just inside the door.” But the woman had already taken a step down the ladder and reached for them. Ingram lifted them from her hand without thanks, without even seeing her, and whirled, bringing them to bear on
Saracen
. She was still going straight away on the same course. As he adjusted the knob, she leaped sharply into focus, every detail distinct. Rae still lay huddled on the afterdeck, as far as he could tell in the same position. Warriner was at the wheel, looking forward, apparently into the binnacle. Maybe he had forgotten she was there. Then Ingram realized the futility of any conjecture as to what went on in Warriner’s mind. “Have you got a spare compass?” he asked without lowering the binoculars. “Boat compass, or a telltale in one of the cabins—”
“There’s a little one in a box in the chartroom,” the man said.
“Get it,” Ingram ordered, “and set it in the dinghy. Then put your azimuth ring on the steering compass and keep calling out the bearing of that boat.”
“And what’s all that jazz for?” the man asked. He hadn’t moved.
Ingram lowered the glasses then and looked at him for the first time. “You do what I tell you to, you son of a bitch,” he said, “and do it now. My wife’s still on there. If he throws her overboard, I want to know where. And if I don’t get to her in time because I didn’t have a course, and a compass in that dinghy, you’ll go next.”
“Just a minute, friend—” the man began, but Ingram had already turned away and locked the glasses on
Saracen
again. She was at least a half-mile away; he could still see Rae lying on deck, but less clearly now. He heard the woman say, “Oh, stop it; just do as he says. You find the compass, and I’ll get the azimuth ring.” He paid no attention. He was trying to make a cold appraisal of the several possibilities while at the same time struggling in the back of his mind with the dark animal of fear. This might be the last time he would ever see her, this dwindling spot of color fading away toward the outer limit of binoculars, but that was something he couldn’t think about. If he lost his head, there was no chance at all.
She must be still unconscious, because as far as he could tell she hadn’t moved. If Warriner threw her over now, while she was still out, she’d drown. The longer he waited, the more chance there was she’d be conscious and able to swim, but on the other hand, the farther out she was, the more it increased the odds against finding her in time, even with a compass course to follow. In a dinghy you were too low in the water, with a groundswell that was running higher than your head. And he had to see when it happened.
It was already growing difficult to make out the deck. He was too low. He tore his eyes away from the glasses long enough to leap up on the doghouse and brace his legs against the doomed and melancholy rolling of the boat, and for an instant he was conscious again of the forlorn banging of her gear and the rushing sound of water inside the hull. If he got her back, they’d only drown together when this derelict finally gave up and died. Well, you could only take one thing at a time.
Somebody was calling him from the cockpit. It was the woman. “Bearing 240 degrees.”
“Thanks,” he said, without looking around. It was difficult to hold the glasses steady enough now to make out the figures on deck; Warriner must be still running the engine at nearly full throttle, to be that far away. Rae was still there, but in another few minutes he wouldn’t be able to see her at all. But if Warriner let go the wheel long enough to put her over,
Saracen
would swing around; that he’d be able to see.
“No change. Still 240,” the woman said.
“Right—” Minutes dragged by. He lost all track of time. His arms ached, trying to hold the glasses still. The sun beat down on his head, and he could feel sweat run in little rivulets across his face. He could no longer see
Saracen’s
deck at all, but her course continued straight on toward the southwest without a bobble. She must be still there…
“Still 240.”
It was hopeless now; he might as well admit it. Even if he knew exactly where it happened, the odds were astronomical against finding her in time at that distance. It would take the dinghy three-quarters of an hour to get there, and even the slightest deviation from the course would increase the area by square miles of rolling ocean, all of it exactly alike.
“That’ll do for the moment,” he called out to the woman. “Your auxiliary’s under water? I mean, it won’t run at all?”
“No,” she said. “It’s completely submerged. There’s no fuel, anyway; we used it all.”
He swung the glasses, searching for signs of wind. It would take a half-gale, he thought, to move this cistern through the water, even if they could keep it afloat. As far as he could see in every direction, the surface was as slick as oil.
Saracen
was hull down, fading over the rim of the horizon. Swept by fear for Rae and black rage at his own helplessness, he wanted to curse and slam the binoculars through the doghouse roof. Instead, he leaped down on deck and turned to the man, who was in the cockpit beside the woman. “How long have you been pumping?”
“It’s been getting a little worse every day for the past two weeks,” the other replied.
“And you haven’t been able to hold it at all, or locate the leaks?”
“I think all her seams are opening up. We could keep up with it at first by pumping two or three hours a day. After a while it took six. And for the past thirty-six hours there’s been somebody on the pump every minute—that is, till around sunup this morning, when he slugged me and locked us in there. No warning at all—the crazy bastard just blew his gasket and tried to kill us—”
Ingram cut him off. “We haven’t got time for the story of your life. How bad’s that cut on your head?”
The other shrugged. “I’ll live. Long enough to drown, anyway.”
“Better have it looked after.” Ingram addressed the woman. “Take him below and clean it and put Mercurochrome or something on it. If it needs stitches, cut the hair away, and call me—I mean, if you’ve got sutures and a needle. When you come back, bring up two buckets and a couple of pieces of line eight or ten feet long.”
“What for?” the man asked.
Ingram turned toward him. “That’s twice you’ve asked me that when I told you to do something. Don’t do it again.”
The other’s grin hardened. “So don’t throw your weight so hard, sport; you might throw it overboard. You may be Captain Bligh on your own boat—”
Ingram walked back to the break of the raised deck and stood looking down at him. “You finished?”
“For the moment. Why?”
“I’m going to tell you, if you’re sure you’ve said all you’ve got to say. You mentioned my boat.” He gestured bleakly toward the southwest. “There it goes. My wife’s on it, with a maniac, unless he’s already killed her. I don’t know what he is to you, and I don’t care, but he came off this boat, if you follow me. So let’s understand each other, once and for all; we’re going after him in this tub if we have to walk and carry it on our backs, and it’s going to stay afloat if you have to drink the water out of it with a straw. I haven’t got time to kiss you or draw you a diagram every time I tell you to do something, so don’t ask me any questions. And I’m pretty close to the edge, so don’t bump me. That clear now?”
There was no fear in the other’s eyes and no bluster, only that hard-bitten humor. “Sounds fair enough, sport, if you know what you’re doing. But be sure you do; I’m allergic to stupid orders.”
“Right,” Ingram said. “How about the radio?”
“Kaput.”
“The receiver too?”
“Yeah. Whole thing was powered by the main batteries.”
“Why didn’t you bring the batteries up here somewhere before the water covered them? That occur to you?”
“They were already discharged. No more gas for the generator.”
No power, no radio, no lights, Ingram thought bitterly. “All right. Go fix your head. And don’t be gone all day.”