1
Though it had been less than four hours since he’d secured
everything on deck and come below, Ingram awoke just at
dawn. He turned his head in the faint light inside the cabin
and looked at his wife asleep in the opposite bunk. Rae,
wearing sleeveless short pajamas of lightweight cotton, was
lying on her stomach, her face turned toward him, the mop of
tawny hair spread across the pillow encircled by her arms, her
legs spread slightly apart and braced, even in sleep, against
the motion of the ketch. She never minded, he thought; some
people grew irritable and impossible to live with on a sailboat
too long becalmed, with its endless rolling and slatting of gear
and its annoying and unstoppable noises of objects shifting
back and forth in drawers and lockers, but except for an
occasional pungent remark when the stove threw something
at her she took it uncomplainingly. They weren’t in a hurry,
she pointed out, they were on their honeymoon, and they had
privacy measurable in millions of square miles.
Without even consciously thinking about it, his mind
received, filtered, and evaluated each of the individual sounds
in the orchestration of creaks and minute collisions going on
about him, oblivious to the total melody but capable of
becoming instantly alert at the mere suspicion of a note that
was out of place. Nothing was rolling or banging on deck;
everything was still secure topside. The metallic bumping just
beyond his feet in the galley section of the cabin was the
Dead Calm — 2
teakettle sliding against the rails that kept it on the stove. The
click and intermittent rattle above it were dishes shifting
minutely inside their stowage on the bulkhead above the sink.
The creaking was only a timber working normally as she
swung and swung back; if a boat didn’t have flexibility it
would break up against any kind of sea, like a car smashed
against a wall. That sound of something rolling back and forth
was a pencil loose in a drawer. The clock struck four bells. He
stretched luxuriously. Six a.m. Hot. Dead calm. But at least
they’d sailed out of yesterday’s grapefruit rinds. They’d had a
light southeasterly breeze for six hours last night, which
should put them at least another twenty-five miles along their
course.
After sliding out of the bunk, he put on water for coffee,
moving silently about the galley so as not to disturb Rae. He
stripped off his pajamas, picked up a towel, and mounted the
companion ladder to the cockpit. Everything on deck was
drenched with dew; it stood in great sweaty beads on the
brass cover of the binnacle, and the bottoms of the cockpit
cushions he’d reversed last night were as wet as if they’d been
rained on. It was full daylight now, and the towering
escarpments of cloud to the eastward were shot with flame.
Not a breath of air stirred; the surface of the Pacific was as
unwrinkled as glass except for the heave and surge of the long
groundswell running up from the infinite distances of the
Southern Hemisphere.
Standing naked in the cockpit, he leaned over and peered
into the binnacle from sheer force of habit to check the
heading of the ketch as she lay dead in the water except for
her rolling. She was lying 290 at the moment, almost abeam to
the swell. He turned and looked forward. Everything was
secure. Wind or no wind, it was morning, it was beautiful, and
it was good to be alive. He was where he wanted to be, at sea
with a sound boat and with Rae. They were nineteen days out
of the Canal, bound for Tahiti and the islands to the south,
tied to no schedule, free of the frustrations and annoyances of
life ashore.
He grinned suddenly and made an impatient gesture with
his hand. Goofing off. The water for the coffee would be
boiling in a few minutes. Reaching inside the companion
hatch, he switched off the masthead light, and went forward.
Dead Calm — 3
Shoved under the lashings of the dinghy atop the deckhouse
was a short ladder. He pulled it free, hung it over the port
side, stepped over the lifeline, and dived. After coming to the
surface, he swam with a powerful crawl stroke up along her
side, under the bow, and back down the other side. He turned
on his back and floated some fifty feet astern, looking up at
her with affection.
Saracen was thirty-two feet on the waterline, forty over-all,
ketch-rigged. She was mahogany planked over oak frames and
had been built less than ten years ago by a New England yard.
She wasn’t as fast as some, nor as tall and long-ended and
patrician of line, but she was reasonably dry on deck and with
her short overhang forward and her deep forefoot she
pounded very little in a seaway. Deep-water cruising was what
she was built for, he thought, and she was good at it. She’d
take you there as fast as you needed to go, and she’d bring
you back from anything a sane man would take her into.
He swam back, climbed aboard, and stowed the ladder. In
the cockpit he rubbed himself down vigorously with the towel
and tied it around his middle. He was a big man, no longer
young—he was forty-four—with a flat, windburned face and
cool gray eyes. The hair was dark, atrociously cut some five
days ago by his wife, graying deeply at the temples, and his
shoulders and back were hard and rope-muscled, burned dark
by the tropical sun. Along his left hip and in back of his left leg
were the slick, hairless whorls of old scar tissue, relic of an
explosion and fire aboard a boat when he’d operated a
shipyard in Puerto Rico, but the limp was long since gone.
He started below to dress and make the coffee, but paused
with one foot on the companion ladder to take a last look
around the horizon for squalls. They could make up very fast
here in the belt of calms along the Line, even in the early
morning. There were no clouds that looked suspicious at the
moment— His eyes stopped suddenly and returned to the
sector off the starboard bow. He’d seen something. Or had he?
Yes, there it was again, a tiny speck almost over the rim of the
horizon. It disappeared and came into view again. Without
removing his eyes from it, he reached inside the hatch and
lifted the big seven-by-fifty binoculars from the rack on the
after bulkhead. It was a boat.
Dead Calm — 4
At that distance, even with the glasses, he could make out
nothing about it except that it appeared to be two-masted and
was carrying no sail at the moment. He stepped back to the
binnacle and checked the heading. It was bearing about 310
degrees. He looked at it again, but it was impossible to tell
whether or not anyone was on deck; it was, in fact, visible at
all only when it rose to the crest of a swell. Rae would want to
see it, he thought; it was the only sign of life they’d sighted
since leaving Panama nearly three weeks ago. Well, it’d still
be there after breakfast; nobody was going anywhere until
they got some wind.
He went below and pulled on khaki shorts and sneakers. The
water was boiling now. He measured out the coffee and
poured it. While it was running through he wound the
chronometer. He checked the barometer, giving it a little tap
with his fingernail. It was steady at 29.91. He entered it in the
log, along with the time, and the notation, “Calm. PC to clr.
Mod. S’ly swell.”
Rae rolled over and sat up, yawning. She brushed the tawny
mane of hair back from her face and grinned. “Hi, Skipper.”
He perched on the side of the bunk and kissed her. “Hi,
beautiful.”
She made a deprecating gesture. “Everybody’s beautiful
when he first wakes up. It’s called the blotched, rumpled, and
bleary-eyed look; beauty shops can’t duplicate it. Mmmmm, I
was having a wonderful dream.”
“About what?” he asked.
“Fresh water. There was a sunken tub about the size of
Rhode Island, with two hundred pounds of bath salts in it—”
“Miss all that too much?”
She rumpled his still-wet hair. “Silly. Who’d want to be a
clean widow when she could be a dirty sailor’s wife?”
“Watch your language, Mate. I just bathed in the Pacific
Ocean.”
“God, the English language, at seven o’clock in the morning.
I mean the dirty wife of a clean sailor.”
“Okay, Moonbeam McSwine. How about a cup of coffee?”
“Love it.” She swung long bare legs off the bunk and
disappeared into the head, which opened off the narrow
Dead Calm — 5
passageway between the forward and after compartments.
She came out a few minutes later, face washed and hair
combed, and sat down on the bunk with her legs braced
against the one opposite. He handed her the mug of coffee
and a lighted cigarette. “We’ve got company.”
“You mean somebody else is using our ocean?”
He nodded. “I just sighted him.”
“Who? Where?”
“Three or four miles away, to the northwest. Looks like a
yacht. Yawl or ketch.”
“Where do you suppose he’s going?”
He grinned. “Nowhere at the moment. He’s becalmed too.”
“If we could get together and all whistle for wind at the
same time, like a grievance committee, or a delegation—”
“This won’t last much longer. We whittled off another
twenty or thirty miles last night. In a few more days we ought
to be picking up the Trades.”
“Oh, I’m not complaining. Being becalmed has its points.”
“It does?” he asked. “I can only think of one.”
“That’s the one. Nobody has to be at the wheel.”
“I thought you liked to steer.”
“I do.” She smiled roguishly. “And no further comment, not
at this hour of the morning.”
“You’re a hard woman. Look, I intended to run the engine a
few minutes today to dry it out; if you want to, after breakfast
we could run over and hail our neighbor. You like to gossip
awhile, or borrow a cup of sugar?”
“Sure. But could I have a swim first? Or is he within
binocular range?”
“Not unless he’s got the Mount Palomar telescope. Anyway,
you could wear a suit.”
She sniffed. “Swim suit? Fine pagan you are.”
After they’d cooked and eaten breakfast and washed the
dishes, he returned to the cockpit. The sun was up now,
glaring brassily on the polished surface of the sea. Saracen
had swung around on the swell, but he checked the bearing on
the compass and located the other boat without difficulty,
using the binoculars. It was off the starboard quarter. Rae
Dead Calm — 6
came up, wrapped in a terrycloth robe and carrying a towel.
“Which way is he?”
He handed her the binoculars and pointed. She searched for
a moment. “Mmmmm. There he is. Is he really that small, or
just so far away?”
“He’s a long way off.”
She grinned. “Far enough, I think. I can’t even tell if there’s
anybody on deck.”
he went forward, hung the ladder over the side, unbelted
the robe, and let it drop. She stepped across the lifeline,
poised for a moment, dived cleanly, and came to the surface
almost immediately with a flip of her head to clear the hair
from her eyes. He walked forward along the port side,
watching the water around and below her, faintly uneasy as
he always was when she was down there. Motion pictures to
the contrary, sharks didn’t always travel on the surface with
their dorsal fins conveniently showing. “Don’t go too far from
the ladder,” he warned.
“I won’t.”
She swam back and forth several times and came back to
the ladder. When she had her feet on the bottom rung and the
lifeline in her hands, he said, “Wait there a minute.” He
turned and ran below, grabbed a saucepan, and pumped a
quart of fresh water into it at the sink. She watched, puzzled,
as he came hurrying back. He knelt and poured it slowly over
her head, washing the salt water out of her hair. She began to
laugh, and when he put down the saucepan she sprang the
rest of the way up the ladder and threw her arms about him.
“It’s because I love you,” he said, as wet now as she was.
She kissed him again, and then broke up into laughter once
more with her face against his throat. “I was thinking of that
woman the Taj Mahal was built for.”
“Why?”
“When she was alive, I bet even her husband didn’t pour a
whole quart of fresh water in her hair.”
“Probably nothing but emeralds.”
“The clod.” She pushed back. “But I’d better get some
clothes on. They just might have bigger binoculars over
there.”
Dead Calm — 7
He went back to the cockpit. She dried herself with the
towel, wrapped it about her head, put on the robe, and went
below. The engine controls were in the cockpit. He set the
choke, switched on the ignition, and turned it over with the
starter. It caught on the third or fourth try, coughed once, and
settled down to a steady rumble. He let it idle a few minutes
to warm up, and shoved the lever ahead. Taking the wheel, he
brought her around and steadied up on the approximate
bearing of the other craft. Now that they were under way, the
rolling lessened almost miraculously, and the slight breeze of
their passage felt cool against his face. He reached for the
glasses, picked up the boat again, brought Saracen a few
degrees to the right to line it up dead ahead, and checked the
compass course. Three-fifteen was about right.
“Honey,” he called down the hatch, “when you come up, will
you bring me a cigar?”
“Right, Skipper. But don’t get there too fast. If we’re going
calling, I’ve got to dress and put on my face.”
“Take your time. It’ll be a half-hour or more.”
She came on deck in about five minutes, dressed in
Bermuda shorts and a white blouse. Her still-damp hair was
combed back and tied with a scrap of ribbon, and she’d put on
lipstick. He lit the cigar she handed him. She picked up the
binoculars and turned forward, searching for the other craft.
The sun struck coppery highlights in her hair as she swayed
with the motion of the ketch, balancing easily on bare feet.
“Still can’t tell whether there’s anybody on deck,” she said.
“She’s a long way off yet,” Ingram replied. “And they could
be asleep—” He broke off at a muttered exclamation from Rae.
“What is it?”
She spoke without lowering the glasses. “I thought I saw
something else. Between here and there.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It was just a speck, and it’s gone now—no.
Wait. There it was again.”
“Turtle?” he asked.
“No-o. It’d have to be bigger than that; it’s too far away.
Here, you take a look.”
Dead Calm — 8
He slid over and stood up in the cockpit. She took the wheel
and repeated the compass course. “It’s almost dead ahead,”
she said. “I only had a couple of quick glimpses of it, but I
think it was right in line with the other boat and probably
three-quarters of the way over to it.”
He put a knee on the starboard cockpit cushion and leaned
to the right to get out of line with the masts as he adjusted the
glasses. He picked up the other craft and studied it for a
moment. Ketch-rigged, he thought, and probably a little larger
than Saracen. There was no one visible on deck. She was
almost abeam to the swell and rolling sluggishly. He lowered
the glasses a bit and began to search the slickly heaving
surface of the sea that lay between.
“See anything?” Rae asked.
“Not yet.” Then he did. It was only a speck in the distance,
showing for an instant as it rose to the broad crest of a swell.
It dropped from view. He marked the location in reference to
the other craft and tried to hold the glasses steady to catch it
when it came up again. Saracen rolled, and he lost it. “Had it,”
he said. “Wait—here it is again.” It was in view for several
seconds this time, and he was able to make out what it was
—”Dinghy,” he announced.
“Adrift?” she asked.
“No. There’s somebody in it.”
“Odd place to go for a row.”
Ingram frowned, still studying the tiny shell. “I think he’s
coming this way. Must have sighted us and started to row
over.”
“That’s doing it the hard way,” she remarked with a puzzled
glance at the back of his head. “Why wouldn’t he crank up the
auxiliary? He must have one.”
“I don’t know,” Ingram said. “Unless it’s out of commission.”
In another few minutes the dinghy was within easy view
without the glasses, continuing to advance across the slick
undulations of the sea as its occupant pulled rapidly at the
oars, never pausing or even slowing the beat as he turned his
head from time to time to check his course. It would have
been long since obvious to him that Saracen was under way
and headed for him, and Ingram wondered why he didn’t
merely rest on the oars and wait. Judging from the distance
Dead Calm — 9
remaining to the other yacht, he’d already rowed well over a
mile, apparently at that same racing beat. The occupant was a
man, bareheaded, wearing a yellow life-jacket.
He was less than a hundred yards away now. Ingram
reached down and cut the engine, and in the sudden silence
they could hear the creak and rattle of oarlocks as the dinghy
came on, its pace unchecked, across the closing gap. Saracen
slowed and came to rest, slewing around on the swell, port
side toward the approaching boat. The man looked around
over his shoulder but did not hail. He was going to hit
amidships. Ingram stepped quickly up on deck and knelt at
the rail. He caught the bow of the dinghy and tried to fend it
off, but a last explosive pull at the oars had given it too much
momentum, and it bumped anyway. It swung around against
Saracen’s side. The man let go the oars. One of them started
to slide overboard, but Ingram grabbed it with his other hand
and dropped it into the dinghy. “Okay,” he said soothingly.
“Just take it easy.”
The other paid no attention. His lips moved, but he uttered
no sound, his eyes reflecting some furious intensity of
concentration that excluded all else. Ingram took a turn
around a lifeline stanchion with the dinghy’s painter and held
down a hand to help him on deck. The man caught his arm
between elbow and wrist with a grip that made him wince.
The other hand caught the stanchion, and he came up all in
one plunging and desperate leap that kicked the dinghy
backward against its painter and almost capsized it, clawing
his way over the lifeline and catching the handrail along the
edge of the deckhouse. The suddenness of it caught Ingram
unawares, and when the man crashed into him he fell
backward and sat down abruptly on the deckhouse coaming.
For some reason his glance fell on the other’s hand, the one
holding on to the handrail. It appeared to be infected from a
small wound or cut across the knuckles, but it was the grip
itself that caught his attention. The fingers were locked
around the handrail so tightly they were flattened and white
beneath the tan.
Hunger? he wondered. No, a starving man wouldn’t have
had the strength to lunge aboard that way. More probably
thirst. “Water,” he said quietly to Rae. “Not too much.”
Dead Calm — 10
But she had anticipated the request and was already going
down the ladder. The man inched his way aft, clinging tightly
to both the lifeline and the handrail along the deckhouse, as
though suspended over some terrifying abyss. Ingram
followed closely behind him to catch him if he stumbled. The
man made it to the cockpit and sank down on one of the
cushions, looked around him at the sea with a shuddering
motion of his shoulders, and slumped forward with his face in
his hands.
Rae came hurrying up the ladder from below with an
aluminum cup partly filled with water. Ingram took it and
touched the man lightly on the shoulder. “Here you go,” he
said. “Just take it slow, and there’ll be more in a minute.”
The other looked up, blankly at first, and then with dawning
comprehension as though aware of them for the first time, and
Ingram was conscious of the thought that the face bore none
of the ravages he’d always read of as associated with extreme
and prolonged thirst—no cracked and blackened lips or
swollen tongue. It was, in spite of the growth of golden beard,
a boyish and strikingly handsome face, tanned and slender but
not haggard, and unmarked by anything except perhaps
exhaustion. The gray eyes were red-rimmed as if the man
hadn’t slept in a long time. Besides the life-jacket he wore only
white sneakers and a pair of faded khaki shorts, and it was
obvious he was not only quite young, probably still in his early
twenties, but powerfully built and in top physical condition.
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He reached for the
water, almost indifferently, drank, and put the cup down
beside him on the cockpit seat. Ingram saw with surprise that
he hadn’t even finished it. He drew a hand across his face and
made a shaky attempt at a smile. “Man, am I glad to see you.”
Then he added abruptly, like a small boy suddenly
remembering his manners, “My name’s Hughie Warriner.”
“John Ingram,” Ingram said, holding out his hand. “And my
wife, Rae.” Warriner started to get up, but Rae shook her head
and smiled. “No. Just rest.”
“What’s the trouble?” Ingram asked.
Warriner gestured wearily toward the other yacht rolling on
the groundswell a mile away. “She’s going down. She’s been
sinking for days, and I doubt she’ll last through the morning.”
“What happened?”
Dead Calm — 11
“I don’t know,” the young man replied. “She just seemed to
open up all over. I’ve been at the pump for a week, and almost
continuously for the past two days, but I couldn’t keep up with
it. And since around midnight it’s been gaining faster all the
time.”
Ingram nodded. It would, as she settled lower in the water
and additional seams were submerged. Warriner went on, “I
thought I was done for, till I looked over here awhile ago and
saw you, and then I was scared to death a breeze would come
up and you’d go on without ever seeing me. I fired off a couple
of flares, but nothing happened. I guess you couldn’t see ‘em
that far away in sunlight—”
“It was probably while we were below eating breakfast,
anyway,” Ingram said. “And the water’s up in your engine
now?”
“Yes. But it hasn’t worked for a long time anyway. I tried
calling you on the radio, but of course if you hadn’t seen me
you wouldn’t have yours turned on, not out here. So my only
chance was to try to get over to you with the dinghy before
you caught a breeze.” He sighed and brushed a hand across
his face again. “And am I glad you saw me.”
“Yeah, that’s cutting it a little fine.” Ingram grinned briefly
and reached for the ignition key to start the engine again.
“But we’d better get on over there. How many aboard?”
“Nobody,” Warriner said. “I’m alone.”
“Alone?” Involuntarily, Ingram straightened and looked out
across the metallic expanse of sea toward the other yacht.
Even at that distance it was obvious she was larger than
Saracen. “You were trying to take her across the Pacific
single-handed?”
“No. There were four of us when we left Santa Barbara…”
Warriner’s voice trailed off, and he stared down at his hands.
Then he went on quietly. “My wife and the other couple died
ten days ago.”
Dead Calm — 12
2
“Oh, how awful!” Rae cried out and checked herself barely in
time to keep from adding, “You poor boy!”—in spite of
Warriner’s being in the neighborhood of six feet and probably
not more than six or eight years younger than she was.
Already drawn by the clean-cut, boyish appearance, good
looks, and obvious good manners in the face of disaster, she
felt a stab of almost motherly compassion and an illogical
desire to take him in her arms and comfort him. “How did it
happen?” Then she went on hurriedly, “But never mind. You
can talk later. Can I get you something to eat? Or some more
water?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Ingram, I’m all right,” Warriner
replied. “But I could use a cigarette if you have one.”
“Of course.” She produced them from the pocket of her
shorts and held out the lighter. “And why don’t you take off
that life-jacket? It’s hot enough without wearing that thing.”
“Oh… sure.” Warriner looked down at it uncertainly and
began unfastening it. He placed it on the seat beside him. “I
guess I forgot I had it on.”
Ingram’s cigar had gone out. He relighted it and tossed the
match overboard. “What happened?” he asked.
It was some kind of food poisoning.” Warriner stared
somberly at the smoke curling upward from the cigarette
forgotten between his fingers. “They all died in one afternoon,
Dead Calm — 13
within four hours. It was horrible…” He shook his head and
then went on in the same flat, mechanical voice. “No, there’s
no word for what it was like, alone in the middle of the ocean
with three people sick and dying, one after the other, all in
different stages of the same symptoms, and not being able to
do anything about it. And knowing after the first one died
there was no hope for the others. My wife was the last one,
just at sunset. And the terrible part of it was I wasn’t even
sick. I just stood there and watched them die, like something
that was happening on the other side of a glass wall I couldn’t
get through.”
Rae reached down and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m
sorry,” she said. “But don’t talk about it now. You’ve got to get
some sleep.”
“Thank you,” Warriner replied, “but I’m all right. After the
first couple of days I managed to snap out of it and get going
again. And it was about then I began to notice the bilges were
filling up with water and that it took longer every day to pump
them out. Before long it was so bad I didn’t have time to think
about anything but staying afloat. Maybe that was what saved
me from cracking up.”
“Do you know what the poison was?” Ingram asked.
Warriner nodded. “The only thing it could have been was a
can of salmon that must have spoiled. I didn’t eat any, because
I don’t like salmon.”
“Had it been opened a long time?”
“No, just a few minutes before they ate it. But it wasn’t
commercially canned; it was some Russ and Estelle—they
were the other couple—some they put up themselves. Every
year Russ goes up to the Columbia River for a week’s fishing
when the Chinook run is on, and when he catches any they
have some of it smoked and Estelle cans the rest because Russ
claims—I mean, claimed—” Warriner took a deep breath and
went on— “claimed it was better than the commercial pack.
When we started out on this cruise to Papeete, they had four
or five cans left over from last year, so he put them in the
stores. About ten days ago—at least, I think it was ten days,
I’ve lost all track of time—it was Estelle’s turn to fix dinner. It
was hot and muggy and nobody was very hungry. But she
happened to remember the salmon and thought she might be
able to make some kind of salad out of it by cutting up pickles
Dead Calm — 14
and onions and putting mayonnaise on it. I didn’t eat any; I
always figured salmon was for cats, so I made myself a
sandwich out of something.”
“And nobody noticed anything wrong with it?” Ingram didn’t
know why he asked. There didn’t seem to be much you could
do to change the outcome of a tragedy that had happened ten
days ago. “The can wasn’t bulged or anything?”
“If it was, she didn’t notice it. Frankly, she’d had about
three rum sours before she went below to fix it. We’d all had,
for that matter. And if there was any odor, the onions must
have covered it up.
“That was around seven p.m. The next morning between six
and six-thirty Russ came up from below—I was at the wheel—
and said Estelle was feeling nauseated and upset and wanted
to know if I had any idea where those pills were that we’d
brought along for the tourist trots. I turned the wheel over to
him and went below to look for them.
“I thought they might be in the medicine closet in the head
amidships, but when I got down there Estelle was in it, and I
could hear her vomiting. When she came out her face was
white and sweaty and she looked bad. She didn’t have much
on, and when she saw it was me instead of Russ she motioned
for me to look the other way and ran forward into their cabin.
I found the pills and got a glass of water and called out to her.
She said it was all right to come in, she was in the bunk. I
gave her one. She swallowed it, but she kept rubbing her hand
across her face and shaking her head. ‘Brother, that rum,’ she
said. ‘It must have had a delayed-action fuse on it’ Her voice
sounded funny, as if she had something stuck in her throat.
“I asked her if she was sure it was the rum, and she said, ‘I
don’t know. But you look fuzzy around the edges; I can’t get
you into focus.’ She held out her hand and looked at it and
said, ‘God, a Picasso hand. It’s got seven fingers on it—”
“What?” Ingram interrupted. He frowned. “Wait a minutedouble
vision. There’s something I’ve read, or heard—”
“Botulism,” Rae said.
“What’s that?” Warriner asked. “You mean you don’t think it
was the salmon?”
“Yes, it probably was the salmon,” Rae explained.
“Botulism’s a very dangerous type of food poisoning that
Dead Calm — 15
attacks the nervous system. I remember reading an article
about it somewhere. I don’t remember the other symptoms,
but I do recall the double vision and the trouble in speaking or
swallowing.”
“Do you know what the treatment is?” Warriner asked. “We
had a pretty good medicine chest and I tried everything I
could think of, but if it turns out that some simple thing we
had aboard could have saved them …”
Rae shook her head. “You can put your mind at rest about
that. I don’t think there is any treatment except an antitoxin,
which nobody’d have in a first-aid kit. Even if you’d been an
M. D. you couldn’t have done anything for them.”
“Oh. I guess that helps. A little, anyway.” Warriner went on.
“She looked bad, as I said, but I didn’t realize then how sick
she was. I guess she didn’t either. Anyway, about that time we
took two or three heavy rolls and I heard the sails begin to
slat, so I went back on deck. I thought the wind had died out
again and we’d have to sheet everything in—we’d been
becalmed off and on for the past two days, just a capful of
breeze now and then from all around the compass. But when I
got up in the cockpit, that wasn’t it; Russ had left the wheel.
He was hanging over the rail, vomiting, and she’d come up
into the wind.
“He said he thought he’d got a touch of it too. Even then it’d
never occurred to any of us it could be serious; it was just a
joke, like the turista. I told him where the pills were, and to go
on back and turn in and not to relieve me at eight unless he
was sure he was all over it. He went below. The breeze held
on, fairly steady out of the west; we were making at least four
knots, and not too far off the course we wanted, so I didn’t
want to leave the wheel, even when it was eight o’clock and
he didn’t come up.
“About eight-thirty I heard somebody moving around in the
galley and decided at least one of them was feeling better, but
it was Lillian—my wife. She brought me a cup of coffee, and
one for herself, and was sitting in the cockpit drinking it when
all of a sudden she doubled over with a cramp in her stomach.
She ran below to the head. Nobody was able to take the
wheel, and Orpheus was always a cranky boat; she wouldn’t
steer herself on any point of sailing. So I doused everything
and went below to see how they were. Russ and Estelle were
Dead Calm — 16
still in their bunks, when they weren’t trying to get back and
forth to the head. And now Russ was complaining that
everything looked fuzzy, and he was having trouble talking.
Lillian didn’t have any symptoms like that yet; she was just
nauseated and crampy. But I was beginning to be scared, real
scared, thinking of all that empty ocean between us and a
doctor. It almost had to be some kind of food poisoning, and
everybody decided it must have been the salmon because I
hadn’t eaten any and I wasn’t sick—at least, I wasn’t so far. I
got the medicine kit out and started through the first-aid
handbook that came with it. It was no help; there wasn’t
anything about food poisoning in it at all, just a lot of jazz
about what to do if somebody swallows lye or iodine or
something, and how to treat burns and fainting spells and
broken bones.
“By ten o’clock Lillian was beginning to have the same
symptoms, the fuzzy vision and difficulty in swallowing or
talking. The breeze had died out, and it was like an oven
below deck with the sun beating down. Russ and Estelle were
having trouble breathing. I gave up pawing through the
medicines long enough to rig an awning over the cockpit,
intending to move them up there, but by now they were too
sick to make it up the ladder. I couldn’t carry them, not with
the boat rolling the way she was, lying becalmed. I rigged
wind-chutes, which was stupid, because there wasn’t a breath
of air moving, but by this time I was so panicky I didn’t know
what I was doing. I gave them the turista pills, and aspirin,
and paregoric, and I don’t remember what else, but by noon
neither Russ nor Estelle could swallow anything any more.
They couldn’t even talk. All they could do was he there and
fight for breath.
“Russ died a little after three in the afternoon. I hadn’t
thought there could be anything more horrible in the world
than standing there listening to the two of them fighting for
breath in that stifling cabin and not being able to do anything
to help them, but there was. It was when I realized that only
one of them was making that noise now; Russ had stopped.
Which meant there was no hope for the others either. Estelle
was unconscious by that time, so she didn’t know he was
dead. Lillian was still conscious and just beginning to fight for
breath, but she was in our cabin, aft of the doghouse, so she
didn’t know either.
Dead Calm — 17
“Then Estelle died, less than an hour after Russ. The rest of
the day is kind of mixed up and run together; I can only
remember crazy pieces of it—Lillian asking me how the others
were, and I’d say I’d go see, and I’d go into the forward cabin
where they were both dead and then come back and say they
were getting much better now and that she’d be over the
worst of it in a little while. Then I’d go out of the cabin to
pray, so she wouldn’t see me. I remember going up on deck
once; maybe it would work better up there in the open. I
hadn’t prayed for anything since I was a kid, and I guess I
didn’t know how; it struck me once that it seemed like I was
trying to negotiate with God, or strike a bargain, or
something. I kept saying two of them were gone, couldn’t He
leave one?
“Lillian died a little after six. When the sound of her
breathing stopped, the silence was like something screaming
in my ears, and I let go of her and ran up on deck and the sun
was just going down. The sky was red in the west, and the sea
was like blood, and everywhere there was that terrible silence
that went on and on and on as if it was pressing in on me from
all around the horizon…” Warriner dropped his face in his
hands.
Tears were overflowing Rae’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Ingram said,
conscious at the same time of something that disturbed him. It
was the word theatrical intruding on the perimeter of his
mind, and he was angry with himself at this apparent
callousness. Try it on your own stiff upper lip, he thought,
before you throw any rocks; try ten days of it without hearing
another voice and you might get a little purple about it too. He
wished uncomfortably that he could think of something to add
to the simple “I’m sorry,” but nothing was going to help the
boy except the passage of time. He reached toward the
ignition key to start the engine. “But we’d better shag over
there and see if we can salvage some of your gear before she
goes under.”
Warriner shook his head. “There’s nothing worth going
after. It’s all ruined by the water—radio, sextant,
chronometer, everything—”
“How about clothes?”
“These will do. Anyway, I don’t think I could go back aboard.
You understand, don’t you? It isn’t only their dying.
Dead Calm — 18
Remember, they all died below deck. Can you imagine what it
was like, what I had to do?”
Ingram nodded.
Warriner’s face twisted. “Talk about the dignity of death,
and last respects to the dead—pallbearers and bronze caskets
and music and flowers. I dragged my wife’s body up a
companion ladder with a rope—”
“Stop it!” Rae cried out. “You’ve got to quit thinking about
it!”
“I understand,” Ingram said. “But you don’t have to go
aboard; I’ll take care of it, if you’ll just tell me where to find
things—”
“But there’s not anything, I tell you!”
“We ought to get your passport,” Ingram pointed out. “And
whatever money you have aboard. We’re bound for Papeete,
and you’ll need it for your passage home from there. Also,
there’s the log and ship’s papers—”
Warriner gestured impatiently. “The log and ship’s papers
and passport and money are all pulp and sloshing around in
the bilges in three feet of water. If I haven’t already pumped
them overboard.”
“I see,” Ingram said, wondering if he did. “But there’s
another thing. Is she insured?”
“John.” Something in Rae’s voice made him turn. She went
on sweetly, but with a glint in her eyes he’d never seen before.
“I don’t think we’re being very hospitable, or very considerate.
Mr. Warriner needs sleep more than anything at the moment,
so I’m going to fix a bunk for him. If you’ll just come with me
and move those sailbags, dear.”
She went down the ladder. Ingram followed, conscious of
the rigidity of her back as she traversed the rolling cabin and
went through the passage at the forward end. The narrow
compartment in the eyes of the boat held two bunks, slanted
inward toward each other like the sides of a V, but was used
only as a locker now. There were cases of food, unopened
buckets of paint and varnish, and coils of line, all neatly
stowed, and the bunks themselves were piled with bags of
sails. There was no hatch above, only a ventilator, and the
compartment was dimly lighted by the two small portholes
above the bunks.
Dead Calm — 19
She pulled the door shut and came close to him. “John
Ingram!” It was a whisper, but forceful. “I’m ashamed of you; I
never realized you could be this insensitive. Can’t you see that
boy’s on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown? For
heaven’s sake, stop asking him questions and let’s try to get
him to sleep.”
“Well, sure, honey,” he protested. “I realize what he’s been
through. But we ought to make some attempt to salvage what
we can—”
“He doesn’t want to go back on there. I’d think you could
understand that.”
“He doesn’t have to. I told him I’d go.”
“But why? He said there wasn’t anything worth trying to
save, didn’t he?”
“I know. But obviously water wouldn’t ruin everything.
Clothes, for instance. Also, he contradicts himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“The radio, remember? He said it’d been ruined by the
water. But he’d just got through telling us he called us on it.”
She sighed. “Why do men always have to be so literal? Do
you think he’s some kind of machine? John, dear, he lost his
wife and his two friends all in one afternoon, and then spent
the next ten days utterly alone on a sinking boat, and he
probably hasn’t closed his eyes for a week. I’d be doing well to
remember my own name, unless I had it written down
somewhere.”
“All right—” Ingram began.
“Shhhhh! Not so loud.”
“Okay. But you’d think he’d at least want to bring off some
of her things, wouldn’t you? And there was another thing I
was about to explain to him. If that boat’s insured, he’s going
to have a hell of a time trying to collect, with no logbook and
just his unsupported word she was in sinking condition when
he left her—in a dead calm, with no weather making up. The
underwriters are going to ask for a statement from me, and I
can’t corroborate it. How can I? I’ll just have to tell ‘em she
was afloat when I saw her. And that I hadn’t even been aboard
and didn’t know how much water she was taking.”
Dead Calm — 20
“He said she probably wouldn’t last through the morning,
and we’re not going anywhere in this calm, so well still be in
sight when she goes down. But let him get some sleep!”
“Sure. God knows, he probably needs it.” Still vaguely
dissatisfied, he tossed the sailbags into the other bunk and
threw a lashing on them. He went back to the cockpit.
Warriner was slumped on the starboard seat with the
binoculars beside him, as though he’d been looking at the
other yacht. Sunlight struck golden fire in his hair, which had
been crew-cut originally but had grown long over his ears.
Handsome kid, Ingram thought, and then wondered if that
could be the reason for his—well, not distrust, exactly. That
was overstating it. Call it reservation.
“You asked me if she was insured,” Warriner said. “I’m sorry
to say she’s not. We thought the premium was too high for the
risk involved. And also, that if she was lost, we probably would
be too.”
“Is she pretty old?”
“Yes. Over twenty years. I guess we got stung when we
bought her.”
“You didn’t have her surveyed?”
“Well—yes. That is, not by a professional, but a friend of
mine who’s real savvy about boats.”
Ingram nodded but refrained from any comment. Under the
circumstances, it was too much like kicking a man when he
was down to elaborate on the foolishness of buying a twentyyear-
old yacht without a professional survey, especially since
this was a little on the self-evident side at the moment. “You
don’t know what caused her to open up that way? Have any
bad weather?”
Warriner shook his head. “Not recently. That is, except for a
few squalls, which never lasted very long. It was just age and
general unsoundness.”
Ingram was struck by a sudden thought. “You say you were
bound from California to Papeete—aren’t you pretty far east?
Seems to me you’d have crossed the Line nearly a thousand
miles west of here.”
“We were taking it by stages. Down the Mexican coast to La
Paz, and then by way of Clipperton Island.” Warriner made an
attempt at a smile. “Look, I’m sorry I got dumped on you this
Dead Calm — 21
way. But I can pull my weight, and it will shorten the watches.
And I’ll keep out of your hair as much as possible; it’s not
much fun having a third party around.”
“Forget it,” Ingram said, feeling uncomfortable for some
reason. It was the first time he’d ever heard of a shipwreck
victim apologizing for his existence, and he tried again to put
his finger on exactly what there was about this boy that he
couldn’t quite like. There didn’t seem to be any answer. “Hell,
we’re just happy we came along when we did.”
Warriner made no reply. Ingram picked up the glasses,
braced himself against the mizzen boom, and searched out the
other yacht. She was near enough now to make out details on
deck, but he couldn’t tell whether she was any lower in the
water than she had been. She wasn’t down by the head or
stern, but there was no doubt she had water in her, and plenty
of it, from the drunken way she lurched on the swell, taking
too long to come back each time she rolled. She had a short,
rather high deckhouse with windows rather than portholes
located near amidships, and in silhouette was vaguely
reminiscent of a motor-sailer rather than a conventional
sailing yacht. Dumpy-looking, he decided, and probably cranky
as hell and slow. Big auxiliary, no doubt, lots of greenhouse
for cocktail parties, and probably built for somebody who
never used the sails except when he ran out of gas. Still,
Warriner probably had upwards of $30,000 invested in her,
and it was a sad way for a boat to end. “She’s still on an even
keel,” he said, without lowering the glasses. “You sure we
couldn’t gain on it, by pumping and bailing together—at least
enough to start locating the leaks and calking ‘em?”
Warriner shook his head. “It’s hopeless. It’s been pouring in
since around midnight. Nearly six inches in seven hours.”
Ingram glanced down at him and then returned to his
scrutiny of the other boat without comment, still aware of that
nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Something about the whole
thing disturbed him, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. Just
what was it? Warriner was certainly in a position to know how
much water was coming into her. And when you stopped to
take a good look at it, saving her was only a pipe dream. Even
if they could pump her out enough to plug a few of the leaks,
the kid would never make land in her alone. She was too big
Dead Calm — 22
for one man to handle, even without the necessity of being at
the pump twelve to fifteen hours a day.
Dead Calm — 23
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