Dead Calm (9 page)

The answer occurred to her almost immediately. In one of the drawers under the bunks in the main cabin was a spare compass, a small one mounted on gimbals in a wooden box. She sprang up and began furiously hauling the sailbags from in front of the barricaded door. She dragged the cases of stores to one side, slid back the bolt, and peered out. The main cabin was empty.

It took only a minute. She hurried to the sink, softly pumped a cup of water, washed out her mouth, and drank, noting at the same time she’d been right about the access to the engine compartment. The panel was nailed shut. The compass was under the port bunk. Keeping an apprehensive eye on the hatch, she grabbed it out, snatched up a pencil and a pad of scratch paper from in back of the folding chart table, and slipped back inside the forward compartment.

She was about to close the door when another thought occurred to her. While she was able to get out into the other cabin, why not try the radio? If she did it carefully, there was a good chance Warriner wouldn’t hear her. Of course! It was worth the risk.

He’d said the radio on the other boat was ruined by water, but he’d also said he’d used it trying to call them. Which was the truth? It would take only a few minutes to find out. If it was still in working order, John would have it turned on, waiting; there was no doubt at all of that. Keyed up with excitement, she set the compass on the bunk with a pillow against it to keep it from rolling off, and slipped back out the door, closing it softly behind her.

The radio was mounted on bulkhead brackets above the after end of the starboard bunk, the transmitter and receiver in one unit. From there she was still invisible to Warriner at the wheel, and by facing toward the hatch she’d be able to see it darken even before his legs appeared if he started down. There was a loudspeaker, but a switch for cutting it out. She threw the switch to the off position, turned on the receiver, and set the bandswitch to 2638 kilocycles, one of the two inter-ship bands.

Still nervously watching the hatch, she lifted the handset off its bracket. This actuated the switch starting the transmitter. The little rotary converter whirred softly; there was no chance Warriner could hear it above the noise of the engine. She put the handset to her ear and adjusted the gain of the receiver. The tubes had warmed up now. Static popped and hissed, but no one was calling. She reached over and turned the bandswitch to 2738 kilocycles. This was dead too, except for the static.

The transmitter was warmed up now. She pressed the handset button and adjusted the antenna tuning control for maximum indication on the meter. It was working beautifully.

“Saracen
to
Orpheus”
she whispered into the microphone, though there was really no necessity to say anything; as soon as John heard the carrier come on he’d know who it was. There was nobody else out here. “This is the yacht
Saracen
calling
Orpheus.
Come in, please.”

She released the transmit button and listened. Static crackled. She waited thirty seconds. Forty. There was no answer. She called again. There was still no response, no sound of a carrier coming on the air. If he was listening, it must be on the other band; maybe it was the only one
Orpheus
had. She threw the bandswitch and retuned the antenna control.

“Saracen
to
Orpheus,
Saracen
to
Orpheus,”
she whispered. “This is the yacht
Saracen
calling
Orpheus
. Answer on either band. Come in, please.”

She cut the transmitter and listened again, turning the band-switch back and forth between the two channels. The only sound was the eternal crackling and hissing of static from far-off squalls pursuing their violent paths across the wastes of the southern hemisphere. She called twice more on each channel. There was no answer. She replaced the handset, turned off the receiver, and went back inside the forward cabin, wishing now she hadn’t thought of the radio.

But she still had the compass. She picked it up from the bunk, removed the lid from the box, and looked about for a place to set it. It had to be oriented as nearly as possible in a plane with the vessel’s fore-and-aft centerline, and it had to be secured so it couldn’t move. The after bulkhead, she thought, to the right of the door and far enough away from it so it wouldn’t be disturbed by moving the sailbags. She set it on the deck with the after side of the box flush with the bulkhead and cast about for something to hold it in place. Not cases of canned goods; cans were steel. One of the sailbags, of course; there was an extra one. She shoved it up, against the forward side of the box. That would hold it.

She knelt beside it, studying the movements of the card. It was reading 227 degrees. Then 228 … 229 … 228 … 227 … 226 … 226 … 225 … 224 … 223 … 224, 225, 226 … 226 … 226 … At the end of two or three minutes it had swung no further than from 220 to 231 degrees, and most of the time had remained between 223 and 229. The course he was steering was probably 226 degrees. She glanced at her watch and wrote it down on the scratch pad.

10:14 AM  226 degrees Est. speed 6 knots

That would do it, she thought. All that was necessary now was to keep watch on it to see if he changed. There was no certainty, she knew, that this reading of 226 degrees was anywhere near the actual course, the one he was steering in the cockpit; they might even differ by as much as 20 or 30 degrees. John had already taught her that much about the care and the mysterious natures of magnetic compasses. That one up there had been corrected by a professional compass-adjuster who’d inserted in the binnacle the bar magnets necessary to cancel out the errors induced by the vessel’s own magnetism, mostly from the massive iron keel and the engine. This one wasn’t adjusted, of course, and was in a different location besides, but it didn’t matter as long as it didn’t move out of the alignment it was in now. All she had to do, if she ever got control of the boat, was to put it on a general heading of 226 on this compass and then take the correct reading off that one in the cockpit. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would take a lot of running back and forth to average out the error of several tries, but it could eventually be done within an accuracy necessary for the job of retracing their route from the other boat. Provided it wasn’t too far …

For a few minutes she’d forgotten the rest of the problem in her satisfaction at being able to solve this minor part of it, but it all rushed back now and hit her like an icy sea. She sat down, weak-kneed, on one of the other sailbags and regarded end-to-end those two conditions she’d danced across separately and so lightly a moment before.

If she ever got control of the boat … Provided it wasn’t too far …

How was she going to get control of it?

Trying to reason with him, she had already discovered, was futile. Trying to overpower him was so manifestly absurd there was no point wasting time even thinking about it. There was the further fact, already demonstrated, that he regarded any interference with his flight—and probably opposition of any kind—as part of some terrifying conspiracy against his life, and while he was in the grip of this delusion he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. Five minutes later he would be sorry, and he’d probably cry over her body, but that wouldn’t do her a great deal of good if she was already dead. Nor, more to the point, would it save John. So anything she tried from now on had to succeed the first time.

In the back of her mind, of course, there’d been the knowledge that in the end he had to go to sleep sometime. Then she would simply tie him up, turn the boat around, and go back to get John. But now, a little fearfully, she brought this comforting backlog out into the light and began to examine it more closely. In the first place, you couldn’t tie a man up just because he was asleep; he’d wake up. So she’d have to hit him on the head with something. She knew nothing whatever about knocking people unconscious by hitting them on the head, in spite of the easy and apparently painless way it appeared to be accomplished all the time on television, and unless she was able to overcome her natural revulsion to such an act and did it brutally enough and in the right place he’d only wake up and choke her to death. And in the second place, how about that panel into the engine compartment? If he’d remembered to nail that up so she couldn’t tamper with the engine again, he certainly wasn’t going to go to sleep and leave himself unprotected. All he had to do was close the companion hatch and fasten it on the outside, and she’d be locked below.

But it was the third objection that finally wrecked it. He wasn’t going to sleep—not in time to save John. Whatever horror he was fleeing from was still pursuing him down the dark corridors of the mind, and as long as the engine continued to run, he would. She knew no more about abnormal mental states than the average layman, but she was aware that a man in the grip of obsession or some pathological fear could be immune to fatigue for incredible lengths of time. He’d stay right there at the wheel until the engine died for lack of fuel.

How much gasoline did they have?
Saracen’s
cruising range on power was around two hundred miles. The tank had been full when they left Panama, but John ran the engine for short periods every day or so to charge the batteries and to keep the engine itself from succumbing to the saturated humidity of the tropics. Call it a total of ten hours in the nineteen days. At the moderate speed John drove the engine when he was using it, that would be forty-five or fifty miles. So at cruising speed they should have fuel for a hundred and fifty miles or about thirty hours. But Warriner was running the engine almost wide open, which would increase the fuel consumption tremendously. She wasn’t sure how much, but John had said once that beyond a certain point increasing the speed one knot would almost double it. So call it fifteen to eighteen hours, at six knots. And from nine o’clock this morning … Sometime between midnight tonight and three o’clock tomorrow morning they would run out of fuel, ninety to a hundred and ten miles from that foundering hulk John was trapped on.

Then what?

The answer was short, inescapable, and merciless. She’d never find it again.

Assume Warriner
was
incautious enough to drop off to sleep in the cockpit without locking her below, and she was able to knock him out and tie him up—she’d have no fuel, of course, to go back with, so she’d have to sail back. In the interminable calms and fickle airs they’d been fighting for the past two weeks, that could take three or four days. But that wasn’t the really, deadly part of it, not by far. Sailing back, she just wouldn’t find the place; she couldn’t navigate well enough.

Steering a course under power was one thing; averaging out a course while you were beating all over the ocean on a dozen different headings at varying speeds for different lengths of time, and drifting helplessly at the mercy of uncertain currents for long periods of calm was something else entirely. The only way you could do it over any distance at all was with competent celestial navigation. John was teaching her, and she knew how to use the tables, but she was nowhere near accurate enough yet with the sextant. She could do it if she was trying to make a landfall on some headland visible thirty miles at sea, but if she missed the other yacht by more than four miles she’d never see it at all.

This was besides the fact that at the end of three or four days it wouldn’t even be in the same place anyway. Even if it were too full of water to move under sail, currents would still act on it.

And it was sinking. She’d seen herself, from the way it lurched from side to side on the groundswell, there was lots of water in it, and the radio was dead.

Sometime around sunset this evening they would pass the point of no return. After that, they would have used up more than half the gasoline, and every ten minutes would be another mile that nothing would ever buy back—

Sunset
. Suddenly, and with such piercing clarity it made her cry out, she saw him struggling in the water, alone on the emptiness of the sea, as the sun went down and the colors began to fade. She could see every line and angle of the face her finger tips had come to know so well, the sun-wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and that horrible way she had cut his hair; the eyes themselves were open, the clear, cool gray eyes that could be ironic or amused but were far more often gentle, and there seemed to be no fear in them even now but only something she thought was sadness or regret. He made no sound. And there was no lifebelt. If you ever lost a boat, he’d said once, in a place where there was no chance of being picked up, you were better off without it.

She began to shake, all over and uncontrollably, and fell back on the pile of sailbags with the back of her left forearm pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.

One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it away.

He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God, why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way to stop him. There had to be.

It was then she remembered the shotgun.

Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back, reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the starboard bunk. John had never assembled it since he’d brought it aboard but he did check it from time to time to be sure it hadn’t been attacked by rust. He was going to hunt something with it in Australia, or maybe it was New Zealand. In the same drawer were two boxes of its ammunition…

It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.

She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel, gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?

She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine, she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before she went too far.

There was another thing, too, she thought with growing excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this other way.

The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked. She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt and opened the door.

She crossed the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered cautiously out. Her head was still below the level of the deckhouse, but she could see him—or rather, she could see his head and the naked shoulders. He was seated behind the wheel, staring into the binnacle.

He still hadn’t looked up, and she had no intention of venturing farther into his territory until he’d seen her and she could assess his reaction. From here she could still make it back to safety before he could get out from behind the wheel and catch her, but going too far would be like misjudging the length of chain by which some dangerous wild animal was secured. She waited, thinking of this and conscious of the incongruity or even the utter madness of the simile. Dangerous? This nice, well-mannered, unbelievably handsome boy who might have stepped right out of a mother’s dream? That was the horror of it, she thought. Conscious evil or malicious intent you could at least communicate with, but Warriner was capable of destroying her with the pointlessness and the perfect innocence of a falling safe, and with its same imperviousness to argument.

He glanced up then and saw her. He smiled in evident pleasure and said something she couldn’t hear above the noise of the engine. It might be a trick, of course, to entice her within range, but she had to risk it. She went up the ladder, trying to hold her arm as naturally as possible while it clamped the end of the marlinspike inside her blouse. The sea was still like glass, aside from the long undulations of the swell, and after the dimness below she was dazzled for a moment by the shimmering glow of sunlight reflected from it. She stepped out onto the narrow strip of deck along the starboard side of the cockpit, very scared now and pretending to look aft along their wake as though searching for the other boat. Slowly, she thought; stop a minute, and then another step or two, and don’t try to smile; that would be too phony—