Dead Calm (5 page)

They went below. He turned to the pump, which was located against the after side of the doghouse. It had a stirrup handle which was normally covered by a plate flush with the surface of the deck when stowed, but the plate was off now, the handle extending upward. Warriner was up here alone, pumping, when he sighted us, he thought. But instead of calling the others, he slugged the man and locked them in the cabin. Why? He muttered savagely and grabbed the handle; there was no time to waste wondering about the motivations of a psychopath. It was a good pump that could lift a lot of water, and there was no indication of its being clogged. He could hear the water going overboard in a solid-sounding stream as his back bent and straightened.

He started to think of Rae and then tried furiously to make his mind go blank. He’d go crazy. He stepped up the tempo of his pumping. Where the hell were those two? Were they going to take the rest of the summer? Then he realized they hadn’t been gone five minutes. They came back up, carrying two ten-quart buckets, one of them apparently the gurry-bucket from the galley. The man was carrying a length of small line. The blood was washed from his face, and he was wearing a Mexican straw hat with an untrimmed and unbound brim, to protect his head from the sun. “No hemstitching necessary,” he said.

“Okay. Take the pump a minute,” Ingram directed.

“Jawohl, mein Führer.”
He grabbed the handle as Ingram let go, and began throwing a hard, steady stream of water over the side. Ingram glanced at him as he stepped back to the cockpit. Clown? Hard case? Idiot? What difference did it make? The azimuth ring was still on the compass. When
Orpheus
rose to a swell he got a snap bearing of the tiny feather-tip of white that was all that remained now of
Saracen’s
mainsail. It was 242 degrees. Apparently Warriner was still holding the same course. What did that mean? Anything, or nothing, he thought. Dealing with a deranged mind—what was the use even trying to guess?

The ventilating hatch above the after cabin was closed and secured with a steel pin. He slid the pin out and threw the cover all the way back on deck. The opening was on the centerline, directly above the space between the two bunks below. The other two watched, the man continuing to pump, while he grabbed up the line, cut off a piece about eight feet long, and made one end fast to one of the buckets. He dropped it through the opening, gave a flip of the line to upend it as it landed in the water swirling back and forth across the cabin sole, and hauled it up again hand over hand. He pivoted and threw the water over the side. It was going to work, but it was awkward because of the main boom, which was directly over the opening. He freed the end of it from its notch in the center of the gallows frame, shoved it out to the end, and lashed it. It was all right now. He could stand right over the hatch with his legs on opposite sides. He dropped the bucket again, filled it, and flung the water overboard.

“Okay, let your wife take the pump,” he said to the man. “That’s a little easier. You bail here.”

The man made a burlesque bow to the woman, with a flourish toward the pump. “Pamela, little helpmeet—”

“Shut up,” she said. She began pumping. There was something puzzling about the exchange. Ingram didn’t know what it was—or care.

He handed the man the bucket. “You know how to dip water at the end of a fine?”

“Well, I once poured some out of a boot. Not that I like to brag—”

“Have at it,” Ingram said.

The bucket landed on its side, shipped a pint of water, came upright, and floated. After yanking the line back and forth a half-dozen times, the man succeeded finally in sinking it. He hauled the water up.

“I meant without taking all day,” Ingram said. “Look.” He demonstrated, flipping the bucket so it landed in a dipping position and came up full all in one motion. “I want five or six buckets a minute out of there.”

“Think it’ll do any good?”

“I don’t know,” Ingram replied curtly. “But you haven’t been able to keep up with it with the pump alone. If we don’t gain on it this way, put on your swim trunks. The nearest land’s over that way, twelve hundred miles.”

“Geez, don’t scare me like that. For a minute I thought you said twelve thousand.”

Ingram turned away without reply and gathered up the other bucket and the rest of the line. Between the forward side of the doghouse and the foot of the mainmast was another hatch, secured with dogs. He kicked the dogs loose with his feet and opened it. It was over the centerline of the main cabin, and in the dim light below he could see the debris-laden water pouring mournfully back and forth as
Orpheus
rolled. He made the line fast to the bucket and dropped it. He hauled it up, full, and threw the water overboard. This near the mainmast, the boom was in his way, and he had to crouch to avoid it. It was uncomfortable, and after a while it would be back-breaking.

Drop … haul … turn … throw … He counted. It was nine seconds. Call it a conservative six buckets a minute—ten a minute between them. They were ten-quart buckets, twenty pounds of water. Six tons of water an hour, with maybe half that much more from the pump. They’d soon know how fast it was coming in; if they didn’t lower it this way, and damned fast, they were done for. They couldn’t keep up this pace for very long, all three of them 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.

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 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.