Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(4)

She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply.
“How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.
There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound
boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition
of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for
the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of
days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks
ago when they were trying to beat their way back to
Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The
squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded
heavily.
“And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more
pumping to keep her dry?”

Mrs. Warriner nodded. “I think so. But it wasn’t all of a
sudden. Just a little more each day. And it must have been
about three days ago it began to get really bad and come
above the cabin floor when she rolled.”
“How was the weather then?”
She thought. “Nothing stronger than light breezes, as I
recall. But the day before was squally and rough, and she
pitched quite a bit.”
Ingram nodded and spoke to Bellew. “When you get your
breath, turn to on the pump. I’m going below to see what I can
find, and I’ll relieve you in half an hour.”
Dead Calm — 70
He was going through the doghouse when the thought of
Rae poured suddenly through the defenses of his mind again,
leaving him shaken and limp. No matter how you barricaded
yourself against the fear, it lurked always in ambush just
beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an
instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did
she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll
run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what
you can’t.
Below, in the sodden ruin of the cabins, he’d checked the
obvious things first, all the plumbing leading through the hull
below the waterline. There were two heads. He couldn’t get a
good look at the pipes because of the water swirling around
them, but he could feel them with his hands. He wasn’t
looking for a minor leak, but a flood. They were all right; none
of them were broken. He crawled through a hatch into the
flooded engine compartment under the doghouse. The big
two-hundred-horsepower engine was submerged to its rusty
cylinder head in oily water surging from side to side. He
groped around for the intake to the cooling system and
examined the line with his hands. It was intact. Then the leaks
had to be in the hull itself—God alone knew where—and there
was no way to find them unless you could get her dry inside so
you could look.
But you couldn’t lower the water with the pump alone, and
the buckets were useless after you got it as low as the cabin
sole. Maybe there was a fire ax or hatchet aboard; he could
chop away the cabin flooring below those two hatches and
drop the buckets directly into the bilge. His eyes had grown
accustomed to the dim light in the compartment now, and he
looked around him, studying as much of the hull as was above
the water. She was double-planked; he could see the diagonal
seams of the inner skin. He took out his knife and began
poking it at random into the wood. On the third plank the
knife blade went into it as if it were a piece of bread. He felt a
chill along the back of his neck and hurriedly started checking
everywhere he could reach, even into the water below him.
Large areas of the inner planking and of the frames
themselves were spongy with dry rot.
He’d gone back on deck then and asked if there was a diving
mask aboard. Mrs. Warriner told him where to find one. After
Dead Calm — 71
kicking off his sneakers, he’d tossed the end of a line over the
port side so he could get back aboard, and dropped in.
How long? he wondered now, peering upward through the
mask. It was impossible to guess; too much depended on the
weather. In the first hard squall she’d go to the bottom like a
dropped brick. In at least three places just above him along
the turn of the bilge where the green hair of marine growth
waved endlessly as she rolled, he could see the loose buttends
of planks sticking out where her fastenings had worked
loose. Around them the calking was gone, the seams wide
open for the full length of the plank. Keeping a respectful
distance from the plunging and deadly mass above him, he
swam to the surface and forward, around the bow. The
starboard side was even worse. He counted six planks where
the fastenings were coming out. He swam back and climbed
aboard.
Bellew stopped pumping, and they came over to him as he
stood dripping on deck under the brazen weight of the sun.
“Did you find anything?” Mrs. Warriner asked.
He stripped off the mask and nodded. “Yes. But it’s nothing
we can do anything about.”
“Then she’s going down?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t even make a guess as to how long we can
keep her afloat, but she’ll never make the Marquesas.”
“What’s causing it?” Bellew asked.
“Dry rot. In the inner planking and some of the frames. It’s a
disease, generally caused by lack of ventilation, and once it
starts it spreads like smallpox. There may have been only a
few small patches of it when you bought her, but whoever
surveyed her missed ‘em apparently, and now it’s everywhere.
What’s happening is that, even if the outer planking is still
sound, the fastenings are pulling out; the wood inside is too
soft to hold ‘em any more. Pounding in those squalls probably
started them working loose, and now just the rolling sets up
enough play and enough stresses to pull them out. The inner
planking’s no doubt opening up the same way, and the more
she works, the looser it all gets.”
“And there’s nothing we can do?” Mrs. Warriner asked.
“Nothing except keep pumping.”
Dead Calm — 72
She sat down at the break of the raised deck and lit a
cigarette. She blew out the match and tossed it overboard.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ingram. It’s too bad we had to infect you.”
Still occupied with the practical problem of survival, and its
vanishing possibility of solution, he was caught off guard by
this lapse into the figurative. “Infect?”
“With our own particular dry rot. Our contagion of doom.
We should have been flying a quarantine flag.”
Bellew had glanced involuntarily toward the dinghy still
bumping against the side. Ingram saw him but didn’t even
bother to speak; he merely shook his head. Twelve hundred
miles from land, three people in an eight-foot dinghy designed
to carry two the hundred yards or so from an anchored yacht
to the dock, inside a harbor—a bicycle would be about as
practical a lifeboat.
Bellew shrugged. “So it was stupid.” Then he went on, his
eyes bleak. “But I guess you die hard, with unfinished
business.”
“Who doesn’t?” Ingram asked.
“Sure, sure, you’d like to know what happened to your wife.
Me, I’d just like two or three minutes with Hughie-boy.” He
raised brutal hands and made a twisting motion with them,
inches apart. Mrs. Warriner sickened and turned away in a
silence that seemed almost palpably to echo with the creak
and snap of parted vertebrae. Ingram felt sorry for her.
“Never mind,” he said harshly to Bellew. “Get back to
pumping.”
The other fell to without reply. As though conscious of them
now only for the first time, Ingram looked at the bull neck and
massive shoulders and arms, thinking that Bellew probably
could kill a man with his bare hands. It was a good thing he’d
got the jump on him to start with. Or had he? It was
impossible to tell what Bellew thought, or why he took orders
without argument. He had the look of a man it would be very
dangerous to push, and the chances were this docility under
curt commands was nothing but a realistic acceptance of the
facts that Ingram knew the job better than he did and he had
more chance of saving himself if he did as he was told.
Ingram sat down in the cockpit to put his sneakers back on.
Water still dripped from his hair. Mrs. Warriner sat facing
Dead Calm — 73
him, on the edge of the raised deck, her knees drawn up,
moodily smoking. “What is your wife like?” she asked.
“Why?” He didn’t like the question; he saw no reason he
should discuss Rae with these people.
“If she knows how to handle him, I don’t think he’ll hurt
her.”
“I’d like to believe that,” he said bluntly. “But do you mean
you didn’t know how to handle him? When I opened the cabin
door down there and you thought it was him, you were scared
to death.”
The brown eyes met his with perfect frankness. “The
circumstances are different. He thinks we’re trying to kill him.
Also, it wasn’t myself I was afraid for.”
Ingram nodded, remembering how Bellew had been poised
with his club. At the same time, something else disturbed him.
Presumably that was her cabin, hers and Warriner’s. Then if
Warriner was on deck taking his trick at the pump when he’d
sighted Saracen, why had Bellew been in there? But maybe
Warriner had attacked him somewhere else and dragged him
in there while he was unconscious. He shrugged. What
difference did it make?
“Would she panic easily?” Mrs. Warriner asked.
“No,” Ingram said. “I don’t think she’d panic at all. Look,
she’s no high-school girl, or jittery old maid with the vapors.
She’s thirty-five years old, and she was married twice before
she married me. Men are nothing new and startling to her.
She’s never had to deal with an unbalanced one before, but
she has been in tight spots, and she’s clever and coolheaded
and she learns fast. She tried to fight him to get back to the
wheel when he took it away from her, but all that happened
very fast and it was pure reflex. If she survived—” His voice
broke off, and he pulled savagely at the shoelace he was
knotting. “If she survived that time, she’d know better than to
antagonize him again. She’d play it by ear.”
“Is there a weapon of any kind aboard?”
He nodded. “A shotgun.”
Their eyes met again. Then she shivered slightly and looked
down at the cigarette in her hands. Her voice was very small
as she asked, “Could she?”
Dead Calm — 74
“I don’t know,” he said. “Does anybody, till he’s faced with
it?”
“Is she aware that Orpheus is sinking?”
“All she knows is that there was water in her, and that your
husband said she was. She won’t know what to believe now.”
“But the possibility—or probability—will still exist. So they’d
be going off and leaving you to drown.” She was silent for a
moment. “Have you been married long?”
“About four months. We were on our honeymoon.”
She nodded. “I can only give you the opinion of another
woman who was, in effect, on her honeymoon. Both
alternatives are impossible, of course, as long as you continue
to weigh them. But inevitably there’ll be a point when she has
to stop thinking, and it’ll become a simple matter of instinct
versus conditioning. Instinct is a lot older.”
“She may not even remember the gun. Or know how to
assemble it if she does—or get the chance, for that matter.”
“But she would know better than to try to threaten him with
it? You know, the magic wand of television and B pictures?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’d know better than to point it unless
she was prepared to shoot it.” He closed the discussion
abruptly and stood up to look down the hatch. There was
perceptibly more water in the after cabin than there had been
thirty minutes ago. He motioned for Bellew to relinquish the
pump.
“I’ll take over for a couple of hours. We can’t all work all the
time, and I want to get some idea how fast it’s rising against
pumping alone. So the two of you’d better turn in on the
settees in there and see if you can get some sleep. You’re
going to need it.”
“Right,” Bellew agreed. He started down the steps into the
doghouse. Then he turned and asked, “How did he sucker
you?”
Ingram explained briefly how Warriner had rowed out and
come aboard, and the story he’d told. “It kept bothering me,
especially his not wanting to come back aboard here or even
wanting me to. But I had no real reason to doubt him, so I
couldn’t very well force him to, and I didn’t like the idea of
leaving my wife on there alone with him until I knew more
about him. Then he turned in, and I decided to have a look
Dead Calm — 75
anyway. But apparently he wasn’t asleep. You didn’t even
know he’d left?”
“No,” Bellew said. “When we heard you walking around, we
thought it was still him. We didn’t know he’d sighted a rescue
boat when he slugged me and locked us in there. A laugh a
minute, that Hughie-boy. Like to run into him again some
day.”
The contempt in Mrs. Warriner’s voice was like a whiplash.
“Are you sure that’s why he hit you?”
“Why else, baby?” Bellew turned and went on below.
Ingram shrugged and began pumping. Mrs. Warriner
remained where she was, turning slightly so she faced him.
“I’m not sleepy,” she said. “Do you mind if I talk?”
“Go ahead,” he said.
She took a drag on her cigarette and stared moodily at the
smoke. “I can understand your not wanting to talk about your
wife under these circumstances—and least of all to me. But
I’m trying to form a picture of her. Not to belabor the obvious
any more than we have to, she’s the key to this, naturally; we
know what’s going to happen on here, so if there is to be any
other outcome it would have to hinge on what happens on
there within the next few hours. You said she was thirty-five,
which implies—or should imply—a certain amount of maturity.
Is she pretty?”
“Yes,” Ingram said. “She’s very pretty.”
Her smile was fleeting and faintly tinged with sadness. “It
was a silly question to ask a bridegroom. Is she blond or
brunette?”
“Blond,” he said, still pumping. “Or in that jurisdiction. Her
hair’s somewhere between golden blond and light browntawny,
I think you’d call it—and the eyes are sea-green. High
cheekbones, very smooth complexion, beautiful tan. Generally
speaking, it’s the type of face and coloration that go with high
spirit and a very low flashpoint in the temper department, but
she grew up faster than the temper did, and somewhere along
the line they gave her a sense of humor. Maybe she needed it,
to marry me.”
“Don’t add too much modesty to your other virtues,” she
said. “It’ll sound phony. Does she have any children?”
“No. She had a boy, but he died. Polio.”
Dead Calm — 76
“I’m sorry. That was the first marriage?”
“The second. The first marriage was one of those kid things,
during the war. That is, the Second World War—”
“Thank you, Mr. Ingram. But I know which one you mean.
Go on.”
“She wasn’t quite seventeen, and he was a navigator in the
Eighth Air Force. After the war he went back to school on the
GI Bill, pre-med student. She worked, and they lived in a
Quonset hut—you remember the routine. They were both too
young for it, I guess; anyway, he was failing all his subjects
and they began to fight and it didn’t last. She went back to
Texas, and they were divorced. The second marriage was
another thing. No divorce; he was killed in an airplane crash.”
“How old would the boy be if he’d lived?”
“Around twelve, I think.”
“Does she attract children?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her around any.”
“How about the lost, the insecure, the dependent, the
scared?”
He saw the shadow of pain in her eyes again and knew what
she meant. “She has a great deal of tenderness and
sympathy,” he said. “I don’t know how apparent it’ll be after
she’s just been slugged—”
“He’ll know, don’t worry. It’s like radar. And he brings it out
if it’s been latent for years. With that, plus a reasonable
amount of intelligence, I think she can handle him, provided
she doesn’t panic.”
“Why does he think you tried to kill him?”
“He thinks Bellew and I are lovers. And that we planned to
do away with him and Estelle.” She made no attempt to look
away. The brown eyes were completely without expression
now, however, and he could only guess at the torment behind
them. “Unfortunately, there is some justification for his
thinking so. And it’s my fault. I blamed the whole thing on
Bellew awhile ago, but that was in anger. I’m probably as
much responsible for his crackup as Bellew is, in a different
way.”
Ingram was beginning to like her and found that difficult to
believe. Maybe she was too accustomed to taking the rap for
Dead Calm — 77
everything; Warriner had struck him as an alibi artist who’d
load it on anybody in sight. “Well, look, your husband’s a
grown man, or supposed to be—”
“The type of woman he attracts, or is attracted to, never
gave him a chance to be one. And it’s too late now.”
“What happened?” Ingram asked.
For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she said,
“That’s a good question, and I wish I could answer it.
Specifically, what happened was a very tragic accident. The
accident itself is difficult enough to explain, but to understand
why it smashed him you’d have to go back a long way. When
was the first time, Mr. Ingram, that you realized it was
possible for this environment of ours to be unfriendly, and that
it was also possible to find yourself utterly alone in it? I mean,
with nobody to take your head in her lap and tell you
everything was going to be all right, that the critics were
wrong, that the bank must have forgotten to credit your last
deposit, that the pathologist must have made a mistake, or the
teacher that gave you a D was just being spiteful?”
“I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “Probably a long time ago.”
“Precisely. While you were still quite young, and under
relatively harmless circumstances, and over the years you
built up—well, not an immunity, nobody’s immunized—but call
it a progressively higher threshold of susceptibility. It
happened to Hughie for the first time at the age of twentyeight,
alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without even a
lifebelt, and he was there because he’d been betrayed by the
one person he’d been conditioned all his life to trust and
depend on— his mother, in one of her successive
manifestations.”
“Aren’t you riding yourself pretty hard?” Ingram asked.
“No. I don’t think so.” She gazed out across the metallic
glare of the sea to where the sun had already begun its
descent into the west. “If you know the conditions when you
accept the appointment, you also accept the responsibility. I
let him down.”
Dead Calm — 78
8
She was silent for a moment. How did you explain Hughie to a
man who’d seen only the wreckage after he’d been shattered
by the Pacific Ocean, by Bellew’s contemptuous bullying, and
by her own misguided attempts to help him? How make him
see the wit, the charm, the sensitivity, the genuine talent
behind the beach-boy good looks?
Strangely enough, when she’d first met Hughie, a little over
a year ago, he’d been living on a yacht. It was on the island of
Rhodes, snuggled up under the Turkish coast on almost the
opposite side of the world from where she was now, and the
yacht, a glittering and obviously expensive yawl registered
under the Panamanian flag, appeared to be more or less
permanently moored in that harbor astride whose entrance
the Colossus had towered two thousand years before. Hughie
was living aboard it alone, and he was painting.
Oh, it wasn’t his yacht, it belonged to a friend who was only
letting him live on it, he’d disclaimed with a refreshing and
boyish honesty that couldn’t help appealing to a woman who’d
known her share of phonies on two continents. It wasn’t until
somewhat later—too late, in fact—that she learned his
frankness had been a little less than complete, that the friend
was female, a wealthy American divorcee living in Rome, and
that Hughie’s relationship to her was one for which “protégé”
was as good a euphemism as any. By that time she was—as
she would have put it if she’d still been in any condition to
Dead Calm — 79
view the thing with her old self-honesty and clarity of thought
—hooked herself.
She saw him as a talented but too-beautiful boy who was
being ruined by a continuously self-renewing matriarchy of
lionizing sponsors, benefactresses, patronesses-of-art-at-thesource,
surrogate mothers, and rapaciously protective
beldames who started out wanting to adopt him and wound up
by sandbagging him with the flushed and hectic urgencies of
some autumnal reflowering and dragging him off to bed. And
by the time she should have begun to suspect the weakness in
his character she had made the further discovery that he
wasn’t a boy at all, that he was twenty-seven instead of the
twenty she had thought, and she was hopelessly in love with
him.
She was forty years old then and widowed nearly two years,
no longer a victim of the grief and numbness of loss but only
of its emptiness, the feeling that she must have been left over
for something if she could only discover what it was. She’d
come to Europe again. Since she belonged to a set to which
the jet flight across the Pole was only a commute hop, she had
friends in London, Paris, Antibes, Florence, and God knew
where else, but she had avoided them, going on instead to
Istanbul and then back to Athens and Corfu and a footloose
and unscheduled wandering through the Dodecanese,
searching for she knew not what. She’d arrived in Rhodes
around the middle of July for a four-day stay. She’d met
Hughie, and the four days had become a week, and then two,
and finally a month.
“He’s a painter,” she went on. “A good one. And, given a
chance, he might have become a great one. It wasn’t his fault
that women could never leave him alone—”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Ingram broke in, “nothing is ever
Hughie’s fault.”
She nodded somberly. “To some extent, that’s true—if
oversimplified. But there are reasons for it.”
“I’m not knocking it. Probably a very comforting philosophy,
as long as you can keep from having to sign for the mess
sometime when there’s nobody around to hand it to.”
“It’s the way he was raised,” she said. “He’s never had a
chance. Even his childhood was against him. He’s seen his
father only once, and very briefly, in the past seventeen years.
Dead Calm — 80
Though he’s never said so directly, I gather he either hated
him or was afraid of him, and probably at least some of it must
have been his mother’s fault. Certainly the picture that comes
through from the few things he has said is one of such utter
crudity and brutality it seems a little too one-sided to be quite
true.
“His father was—or is, rather—the editor and publisher of a
small daily newspaper in Mississippi, an ex-football player at
one of the Southern universities, and from all accounts a man
whose only passions apparently were drinking, random and
indiscriminate affairs with very sordid women, white
supremacy, and shooting quail. That plus bullying Hughie
because the boy showed more interest in sketching animals
than in killing them. It could be that all of this is literally true,
in spite of its familiarity, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility
of a certain amount of editing by the doting mother and
embittered ex-wife. At any rate, when Hughie was eleven his
parents separated and were later divorced. His mother, who
had a little money of her own, took him to Switzerland. He
went to a private school in Lausanne but lived with her all the
time in the villa she rented there so they wouldn’t be
separated. She never remarried. You can see the pattern, of
course, the possessiveness, the overprotection, the you’dnever-
leave-Mumsy-would-you-after-all-she’s-done-for-you
rubbish. After the school in Switzerland he attended the
Sorbonne for two years and then began studying art, also in
Paris, and also still living with his mother. She died five or six
years ago. There was a little money left, but not enough to
keep him going until he could get some kind of recognition as
a painter. However—” She smiled with a tinge of bitterness,
and went on. “Europe is crawling with middle-aged women
eager to help the struggling young artist, especially if he’s
charming and decorative and well mannered and has no social
liabilities like cutting off his ears or wasting too much time
painting.”
She broke off then with an impatient gesture, as though
annoyed at herself. “I’m sorry. You asked me about the
accident. As I said, it’s difficult to explain how it could have
happened. Fortunately you know the interior layout here,
which will help. Hughie and I occupied the after cabin, and
Mr. and Mrs. Bellew the forward one—”
Dead Calm — 81
Ingram interrupted. “But first, who is Bellew, anyway?
Somehow, I don’t place him in this. Is he a friend, or a
neighbor of yours in Santa Barbara?”
“I’m not from Santa Barbara,” she replied. “San Francisco.
We just bought the boat in Santa Barbara and sailed from
there in the beginning.” She shook another cigarette out of
the pack and held the latter up toward Ingram at the pump.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“You don’t smoke?”
“Only cigars.” He wished he had one, but among the other
things he was wishing for at the moment it didn’t have a very
high priority. “But about Bellew?”
“He’s a writer.” Then, catching Ingram’s look of surprise,
she smiled faintly. “No, he doesn’t remind you a great deal of
Proust or Henry James. He’s a specialized type of writer; he
does articles for outdoor magazines. Hunting and fishing.”
“Wait.” Ingram frowned. “Bellew? Russell Bellew? I think
I’ve seen some of his stories. Marlin fishing, and hunting
sheep in Mexico. With some beautiful photography, as I
recall.”
“His wife did the photography. She was an artist with a
camera.”
Ingram stopped pumping for a moment and walked past her
to the open hatch to look down into the cabin. In spite of his
continuous pumping, the water was still rising. His face was
somber as he walked back to the pump.
She lit the cigarette and carefully blew out the match. “Still
gaining?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. She was a cool one, he thought; and so, for
that matter, was Bellew. That was something, anyway; at least
he didn’t have a couple of screamers on his hands. Of course
there was no telling how they’d take it later on. But then, he
added grimly, there was no telling how he’d do, either; it was
something you couldn’t forecast.
“But we can still hold it by bailing too, can’t we?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We can now.”
“But not for long?”
“Just how long, I don’t know. The only thing that’s certain is
that it’s not going to get any better, but it is going to get
Dead Calm — 82
progressively worse, with this rolling. And in a bad squall, as I
told you, she could come apart like a bale of shingles. But
forgetting the squall, which we can’t do anything about
anyway, she might last for a week yet…” His voice trailed off.
She glanced up questioningly. “There’s something else?”
There was no reason to try to hide it from her, he thought.
“Only this—even if we do keep her afloat for another week,
after tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, it’s not going
to do any good anyway. There’s not a chance in a million we’ll
be sighted by a ship, not where we are. And even if one
happened to pick us up on radar, there’s nothing to indicate
we’re in distress.
“So, as you said, the only thing that could change it is if Rae
is still on there and is able to cope with your husband. She
might even be able to talk him into coming back. If she does,
we’ll probably be all right. The second possibility is that she
may be able to get control of the boat some way. He’ll have to
sleep sometime, or …” He stopped, floundering.
She nodded, her face devoid of expression. “Or she may kill
him. Go on.”
If she could manage it, he could too. “Right,” he said just as
calmly. “But even if she does get control of the boat, it’s
nowhere near as simple as it sounds. She may never find us
again. They’re over the horizon now, and unless she knows the
course he was steering when he left here, she can’t come back
because she won’t know which way back is. Also, at the speed
they were going, somewhere around midnight tonight and
about a hundred miles from here they’re going to run out of
gas, and she can’t make it back unless she gets some wind. In
these conditions, it could take days. Also, at that distance, the
accumulated errors of trying to make good a course while
she’s fighting fluky breezes and calms become so great that
after a while she won’t know within twenty miles where she is
herself.
“She can’t call for help, to get a search organized, even if
there was anybody out here to look. We’ve got a
radiotelephone, but it won’t reach land from here, and you
can’t call a ship with it because they stand their radio watches
on five hundred kilocycles and not the phone bands.
“So if she ever finds us again it’ll be within the next twelve
hours or so, because if they get any farther away there’s
Dead Calm — 83
practically no chance. Have you got any distress flares
aboard?”
“No,” she said. “We thought we had a can of them but we’ve
never been able to find them.”
“How about oil lamps? We’ve got to have something she can
see if she comes back tonight.”
“We have some flashlights. The big long ones.”
“Good. They’ll do. Well leave the mainsail hoisted, and lash
two of them to the shrouds so they’ll shine on it. You can see
an arrangement like that for miles.”
“That’s clever. I wouldn’t have thought of it.”
“It’s an old trick in heavy traffic or poor visibility. Steamship
captains trying to figure out what it is may call you things
that’d raise blisters on a gun turret, but at least they won’t
run you down.”
“I’m glad—” She stopped.
“What?”
“I was about to commit the incredible gaucherie of saying I
was glad you’d come along. Let’s just say that under other
circumstances— May I relieve you at the pump now?”
“Are you sure you’re not sleepy?”
“Yes.”
“All right. You take over here, and I’ll start bailing again.”
He moved over to the hatch. Before he dropped the bucket
in, he paused to look at an ugly mass of cloud along the
horizon to the northeast. It looked like a nasty one, all right,
but it was a long way off. He’d just have to keep an eye on it.
* * *
Saracen shuddered, protesting the engine vibration, and
pitched with a long corkscrew motion as she continued to
plow ahead. Here in the tiny compartment the air was stifling.
Rae Ingram was conscious of thirst, and of the sour taste of
vomit in her mouth. She sat on the bunk and stared
unbelievingly at the barricaded door. She must be mad
herself; Paradise couldn’t have become this nightmare in the
few short hours since sunrise, since this morning’s dawn when
she’d been alone with John on the immensity of the sea, when
she’d swum nude beside the boat with that faint but shivery
Dead Calm — 84
sensation of wickedness—and amusement, because it was a
ridiculous way to act at thirty-five—when he’d used a whole
quart of priceless fresh water to wash the salt out of her hair
because, as he said, he loved her. Could you go from that to
this in three hours? Numbly she looked down at her watch. It
was 9:50. It had been a quarter of an hour since Warriner had
restarted the engine and they’d got under way again.
She tried to force her mind to operate. She was apparently
safe enough for the moment from any further assaults upon
the door; as long as Saracen was under way, he had to be at
the wheel. Also, he was apparently dangerous only when
opposed. But that was unimportant. She still had to stop him.
There was no way she could disable the engine now; she’d
already grasped what that hammering was she’d heard in the
after end of the main cabin. He’d nailed up the access to the
engine compartment so she couldn’t get in—at least without
making enough noise to warn him. Mad or not, he would have
taken some precaution, and that was simpler than trying to
lock her in here. The door opened inward, and there was no
bolt or hasp on the outside.
Then what? The only other place the engine could be
stopped was at the control panel right in front of him in the
cockpit. But wait, she thought suddenly. It had already been
fifteen minutes since they’d started up again, and the other
boat—what was it Warriner had called it, Orpheus?—had been
almost hull down then. And from the sound of the engine it
was still running at nearly full throttle. So merely stopping
Saracen would do no good now, anyway. By this time they
were out of sight over the horizon, and John would never know
it. Then the whole problem was changed, and now it was even
worse. Somehow she had to get control of the boat so she
could take it back— Her thoughts broke off, and she sat up
abruptly, feeling a chill along her spine.
Take it back? Back where?
She’d forgotten she had no idea at all which direction they’d
been traveling since they’d left the other yacht. And with it
lost somewhere over the horizon now, where all directions
looked the same, trying to go back to it could be just as
hopeless at ten miles as at a thousand. First of all and above
everything else, she had to find out and keep track of their
course. But how?
Dead Calm — 85
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
Dead Calm — 86
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.
Dead Calm — 87
9
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
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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 compassadjuster
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.
Dead Calm — 89
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
Dead Calm — 90
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—