1
At sunset the next day after the Shoshone went down,
the wind dropped to a gentle breeze, and by midnight it
was calm. Now that the sea no longer broke, the raft
stopped capsizing and throwing him, and he slept for
the first time in forty hours. He awoke at dawn,
cramped, chilled through, shivering in his wet clothes
in spite of the fact he was only a few degrees south of
the Line. After the first gut-twisting impact of returning
consciousness of where he was and what was coming,
he was able to subdue the black animal and slam the
door of the cage, wondering at the same time why it
mattered. He had nothing to lose now. And he’d already
panicked once, or he wouldn’t be here. He could have
done it the easy way.
He lay stretched out on the rubberized fabric of the
raft’s bottom, his head on its inflated rim, a big man
with graying dark hair too long uncut, gray eyes, and a
broad, flat-planed face burned dark by the sun and now
salt-inflamed and covered to the cheekbones with a
week’s stubble of beard. His feet were bare, and he
wore only the faded and sodden dungarees, a blue
shirt, and a gold-cased Rolex watch which was
waterproof and still running. He was alone on the raft,
which wasn’t much larger than he was and contained
nothing else except a whiskey bottle with a little water
And The Deep Blue Sea — 2
in it. His name was Harry Goddard, he was forty-five
years old, divorced, childless for the past five months,
and until the last of his luck ran out two days ago he
had been single-handing across the Pacific in the thirtytwo-
foot sloop Shoshone for reasons he wasn’t sure of
himself except that the horizon provided a sort of selfrenewing
objective if you no longer had any other.
He was overtaken by another attack of shivering and
wished for the sun’s warmth to begin, knowing that
long before the day was over he’d be praying even
more fervently for its torture to end. The raft lifted
under him, mounting softly and in utter silence, poised
for an instant, and began to fall away again down the
back of another swell rolling across the wastes of the
southern hemisphere. The square shape of the Jack
Daniels bottle was under his left leg, its neck secured to
the fabric eyelet of one of the oarlocks with the lanyard
he had fashioned from a strip of cloth cut from his shirt
tail. He lifted it and squinted at it against the sky. It
still held nearly a half pint of water, and he was
conscious of no torment yet from thirst. The only hell
was the certainty that it was coming.
What happened at the end, just how did you die? Did
you go mad and jump overboard? Drink seawater and
kill yourself with nausea and empty retching? How long
did it take? He didn’t know, but there was no point in
speculating about it now, and he might as well go
ahead and sit up to look around. He was sufficiently
awake and in command of himself to accept what he
would see. Pretending there was still some chance, as
long as he hadn’t looked, that there could be a ship on
the horizon was something to hang onto, but you
couldn’t keep it alive all day.
He raised up, his hands braced against the inflated
rim of the doughnut, and as it rose to the crest of
another swell he turned, searching the rim of his world
where the sea met the sky. There was only emptiness.
Well, he thought, you wanted solitude; you’ve got it.
You’re up to your ass in it.
As deadly as it was, there was no escaping the beauty
of it. In the vast hush of early morning, the sea was
smooth as glass except for the heave and surge of the
And The Deep Blue Sea — 3
long swell running up from the south. It was full
daylight now, the eastern sky a pale wash of rose
becoming barred with gold, and the towering masses of
cloud above him were touched with flame. A school of
flying fish lanced out of the sea, scattering fanwise,
leaving their takeoff trails etched for a fleeting instant
across the mirror of its surface. But above all, and
pervading everything, was the silence; it was the
silence of the world’s dawn, before the beginnings of
life. Under sail there were always sounds, the rushing
of water past the hull, breaking seas, the flutter at the
luff of a sail, spattering of spray, the creak of timbers,
and the singing of wind in the rigging, and even
becalmed there was the slatting of sails and the rolling
and banging of gear that went on forever, but here
there was nothing, no sound at all. The raft was an air
bubble cushioned on a sea of oil that pushed it up, slid
under it without friction or effort, and went on in its
silent march toward infinity.
More flying fish shot out of a swell just ahead of him
like an explosion of silvery projectiles, pursued by some
larger fish below the surface, and he was suddenly
reminded of hunger, remembering other dawns when
he had found two or three of them on deck where
they’d flown into the sails during the night to wind up
unconscious in the scupper and then, cleaned and
breaded, into the frying pan for breakfast. He thought
of how they tasted, with crisp bacon and a boiled
potato, as he sat in the cockpit with the plate on his
knees and a mug of hot coffee beside him, watching the
sun come up. And then the first cigarette of the day—
For Christ’s sake, he thought, knock it off.
He felt a moment’s light-headedness with the
withdrawal pangs of a cigarette addict nearly three
days without a smoke. You could get drunk, he thought,
on simple, uncontaminated air. He glanced at the bottle
again, but resisted the urge to take a swallow,
wondering at the same time why this insistence on
cutting the puppy’s tail off an inch at a time. If he had
anything to write with, he reflected, he could put a note
in it when it was empty. What final bit of wisdom for
the ages, what capsuled summation? A single Anglo-
And The Deep Blue Sea — 4
Saxon word? No, that was grandstanding. He could do
better. Greetings from Harry Goddard, who didn’t have
sense enough to drown.
Not that it was important any more, but he would
never even know what he’d hit that had sent the
Shoshone to the bottom. It couldn’t have been a whale.
Yachts had been damaged by whales, but they usually
made their presence known; they didn’t like it any
better than the yachtsmen who’d hit them. After the
first crashing impact there’d been nothing, no swirl of
flukes or sound of blowing, or any disturbance on the
surface of the sea. And a reef was out of the question;
there would have been white water on it, and there
wasn’t one within a thousand miles, anyway. A derelict
would have had something showing above the surface.
He couldn’t swear, of course, that there hadn’t been,
since it was a dark night and he’d been staring into the
binnacle except for an occasional glance around the
horizon for lights, but it was still improbable. The most
likely suspect was a half-submerged log, some forest
giant washed down one of the great tropical rivers and
carried across the Pacific on its currents or perhaps
lost from the deck cargo of a freighter during a storm.
He’d been fighting the frustrating calms and fluky
airs along the Equator for nearly a week when it
happened. Around noon he’d picked up a gentle breeze
out of the south and had ghosted along under the main
and big genoa, momentarily expecting it to die out or
go swinging around the compass, but it had held,
backing into the southeast and freshening slightly by
the hour. At sunset the Shoshone was heeled down
smartly and reeling off the miles on a broad reach, her
best point of sailing, with the wind still freshening and
the sea beginning to kick up, and by ten p.m. her
starboard rail was awash and she was logging her
maximum hull speed through the darkness. If it picked
up any more he’d have to shorten sail. He was listening
carefully to the moaning sound of the wind in the
rigging and debating whether he ought to get the
genoa off her when she hit.
The sea was almost abeam. One had just rolled under
her, and the Shoshone was dropping into the trough
And The Deep Blue Sea — 5
behind it so that in addition to nearly seven knots
forward speed she came down on whatever it was with
enough force to break the back of a lesser boat.
Goddard shot forward in the cockpit to slam into the
end of the deckhouse beside the companion hatch,
momentarily stunned, while shrouds and backstay
parted like violin strings. The mast went overboard
with its two big sails in a welter of stainless steel wire
and Dacron, and by the time he could push himself
groggily to his feet he could hear it banging against the
hull. He groped inside the hatch for the flashlight, but
in his haste he knocked it out of its clips on the
bulkhead and it fell to the cabin sole. The Shoshone
was rolling violently now, dead in the water, and there
was another crash as the mast swung into her side.
He plunged down the ladder, lost his balance, and
was thrown to his hands and knees against the chart
table. The flashlight rolled into him. He grabbed at it,
but it went clattering away in the darkness. He tried to
calm himself; he was losing his head in a situation
where wasted minutes could mean disaster. He pushed
himself to his feet, switched on the cabin light, and
scooped up the flashlight. It was broken. But there was
another in one of the drawers of the chart table. He
grabbed it out and ran on deck.
He’d already swung the beam of light in a wide arc
across the darkness and the piled and breaking sea
astern, searching futilely for what he’d hit, before the
idiocy of it finally got his attention. What was he after—
a license number, witnesses? He shot the light into the
churning mess along the starboard side. The mast and
the two sails were still fast to the hull by the forestay,
the starboard shrouds, and tangle of halyards and
sheets, so he wasn’t in any danger of losing them, but
the sails were full of water and would have to be
lowered before he could even start to get the spars
back aboard. They were still banging against the hull
with every roll, but the mast itself was hollow and the
boom too light to do any immediate damage to the
planking. It would have to wait. He turned and plunged
down the ladder again, and even as his eyes came
below the level of the hatch he felt the icy tingle of
And The Deep Blue Sea — 6
gooseflesh between his shoulder blades. A tiny rivulet
of water had rolled out of the bilge and was spreading
across the cabin sole that had been dry less than a
minute ago.
At the forward end of the cabin, beyond the foot of
the mast, was the narrow passage into the forepeak,
flanked on one side by the enclosed head and on the
other by a locker. He shot through it, switched on the
light, and looked, expecting to see the whole bow caved
in. There was no visible evidence of damage. But
everything he could see was above the waterline. The
cabin sole extended into this small triangular space in
the bows, and on both sides were benches with lockers
beneath, the whole area piled with sailbags, spare rope,
extra water cans, unopened cases of food, a sea anchor,
and a bundled pneumatic raft. Somewhere under all
this, the Shoshone was badly holed below the
waterline.
He cleared the compartment by the simple expedient
of hurling everything behind him into the cabin,
banging water cans, sailbags, and cases of canned
goods that burst open and scattered when they hit. As
he threw the last of it out of the way, he looked behind
him and saw there was now at least an inch of water
sweeping back and forth across the cabin sole through
this confusion of gear.
In the center of the compartment there was a two-bytwo-
foot hatch in the floorboards. He grasped the
recessed ring-bolt and yanked it out. Water rolled up
through the opening and went running aft—ominously
clear water, fresh from the sea. A small river of it was
flowing in somewhere just forward of him. With the
light overhead he could see the frames and planking
directly below the hatch. They were unbroken. He
grabbed the flashlight and lay flat, training the beam
forward under the edge of the hatch. Still no damage.
But he couldn’t see far enough; the angle was too
sharp, unless he put the flashlight in the water.
He was assailed by a savage compulsion to hurry, and
realized he had been cursing ceaselessly and
monotonously under his breath. He seemed to be
moving forever through a nightmare in slow motion.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 7
What the hell difference did it make whether he could
see the damage from here or not? He knew it was
there, and seeing it wasn’t going to do any good until
he could get at it to try to repair it. He sprang up and
attacked the lockers.
The chain locker first. It was at the apex of the
triangle, right in the bow. The two anchors with their
lengths of chain went flying back to land on the cabin
sole, and then as he grabbed out the big coil of anchor
warp, he saw it—or rather, he saw the upper part of it.
Two frames on the starboard side were broken and
pushed inward, and water poured in through a
shattered plank. But the real damage was still below
the bottom of the locker.
The next contained tools. He threw it open, grabbed
out the small handax, and began smashing at the side
of the locker. He had to tear it out of the way before he
could get at the floor beneath it. It was marine
plywood, fastened with bronze screws, and there was
little room to swing the ax. Before he had half of it
hacked away, he looked down and saw with horror that
he was already standing in several inches of water.
He’d never get to it in time, not from here. He had to
shove something in the hole from outside to slow the
flood enough to hold it with the bilge pump, at least
until daybreak. Grabbing up the flashlight, he ran back
through the cabin, picking up one of the sailbags on the
fly, and hurried on deck.
The Shoshone still lay in the trough, rolling heavily,
but there was already a different feel to her, a
reluctance to come back each time with the inertia of
the water inside her. He threw the light into the
surging mess of spars and cordage and Dacron along
the starboard side and knew it would be suicide to go
under it or between it and the hull. The plunging hull
itself was dangerous enough without the broken mast
battering into it. There was no time to fool with
turnbuckles and shackles, working one-handed on a
lurching deck while he tried to hold a light. He ran
below again for the handax. The steel forestay was
tough, and the ax only buried it in the wood, so it took a
half dozen swings before he severed it. With nothing
And The Deep Blue Sea — 8
holding it forward of the shrouds, he was able to haul
the whole mess aft along the hull and secure it back out
of the way. The sailbag he’d brought up held a storm
jib. He pulled it out of the bag and went over the side
with it.
The dark mass of the bow heaved up and plunged
down on him. He pushed clear, waiting, and when it
steadied for a moment, came in against it. He groped,
felt the jagged ends of broken planking and the water
pouring through, and tried to stuff the jib into it. There
was no clearly defined hole, only a great area of split
and shattered planks and pushed-in frames, nowhere
enough of an opening to get the cloth in far enough to
hold. The Shoshone lurched to starboard and came
down on him with stunning force, pushing him under
the surface. He kicked backward and got clear, and
when she steadied again the sail was gone. He threshed
around with his hands, groping for it; they encountered
nothing. The Shoshone rolled down again and hung
there, wallowing sluggishly. He grabbed the rail and
climbed back aboard. Just as he reached the companion
hatch the cabin lights went out. Water had covered the
batteries. There was no longer any hope. She was
filling too fast for anything to save her.
The next half hour was never very clear in his mind.
He had no precise recollection of how he had got the
raft out of the cabin, found the pump, and inflated it—
nor even why he had done it, except that the survival
instinct was apparently basic and not to be denied by
trifles like logic and realistic appraisals of the situation.
It wasn’t even supposed to be a life raft; he had it
aboard only for skin-diving forays along the reefs of the
South Pacific which he would never reach now. There
were no oars, no sail, and no food or water, but
somewhere in the confusion he had grabbed up the
Jack Daniels bottle he kept in the cockpit so he
wouldn’t have to go below for water during long spells
at the tiller. Each time the doughnut capsized and
threw him he righted it and dragged himself back
aboard, still clutching the neck of the bottle. After an
eternity of this it was dawn, and he secured it to the
oarlock tab with the lanyard cut from his shirt tail. At
And The Deep Blue Sea — 9
the same time he scooped from his pocket the sodden
pulp which was all that remained of a pack of cigarettes
and threw it overboard, thinking of the old gags about
fighter pilots and lung cancer.
The sun rose. The glare began, eye-searing and
brutal, broken only intermittently by the tilting planes
of the swell. His skin itched and chafed inside his saltsaturated
clothing, and as his face and arms began to
dry they felt as though they were encased in a crust
that would shatter when he moved. The only relief,
which was temporary and merely an illusion, was to
plunge overboard and wash it away with water that
would leave its own accumulation. The swell was
smaller now than it had been last night, and if it died
out completely the sea would become the polished
metal sheet of a reflector oven.
He searched the horizon again, and lay back, an arm
across his closed eyes to shield them from the glare. He
thought of mountain streams he had fished where the
water was cold enough to make his teeth hurt when he
drank it, and after a while he found himself
remembering beer—beer in foaming steins and cold
bottles beaded with moisture. Tüborg and Dos Equis
and Budweiser and Lowenbrau, the gaseous and
ecstatic sighs of punched cans, beer in waterfront dives
and yacht club bars, in sidewalk cafes in Paris and the
parlors of Texas whorehouses and the cockpits of
sports fishermen off Cape San Lucas and Bimini.
There was the place in Tampico a long time ago, so
cool and dim after the incandescent whiteness of the
street, where draft beer was served in frosted earthen
steins and there were saucers of olives on the polished
mahogany bar with sliced limes to squeeze over them.
That was on the other Shoshone, the first one, when
he’d run away from home and shipped as ordinary
seaman, and afterward he’d gone out to La Union,
where the girls sat beside the doorways of their cribs,
and he’d got into a fight with the second mate of a
Sinclair tanker over something he couldn’t even
remember now, and the second mate had beaten hell
out of him. He was only nineteen then and still filling
And The Deep Blue Sea — 10
out, but too cocky, and he probably deserved to have
his ass kicked.
It was a long way from the fo’c’sle of an old Hog
Islander to skippering your own Cal 40 in the Acapulco
race, but it had been a long time, too, and where did it
go, that feeling of being nineteen, or twenty-three, or
even thirty-six? You not only didn’t know what had
become of it, you weren’t even sure what it was any
more and couldn’t remember what it had been when
you’d had it. Juice? Drive? Confidence? No, it wasn’t as
simple as that; as close as you could come to it was
caring. Stoically accepting the fact that within a few
days he was going to die was no longer courage; it was
merely apathy. The only real regret was that he’d
suckered himself into such a hell of a sad way of doing
it. He smiled now at the transparency of christening the
sloop Shoshone. Did he think the nineteen-year-old
Harry Goddard was still out here somewhere, to be
searched for and reclaimed?
The sun reached the meridian. Reflected from the oily
surface of the sea, it burned its way even through
closed eyelids and felt like flame against his skin. Real
thirst began, a foretaste of the agony to come, and he
took a swallow of the water, rolling it around his mouth
for long seconds before he let it trickle down his throat.
A shark appeared from somewhere and circled the raft
three or four times as though intrigued by the strange
yellow bubble. Goddard watched its dorsal slicing the
surface and, more to break the eerie silence than
anything else, said to it, ‘Shove off, you silly bastard.
That’s a low-budget routine.’ The shark came closer on
its next pass, and he took out his knife and opened it,
ready to stab if it decided to roll up and take an
experimental bite out of the fabric. The shark lost
interest and went away. Around two p.m. a light breeze
sprang up, riffling and darkening the surface of the sea
and lessening the intensity of its glare. It continued
until late afternoon, making the heat at least endurable,
and died out only with the vast chromatic explosion of
sunset. He watched the colors fade in the sudden velvet
night of the tropics and wondered how many more he
would see. Two? Four? After a while he slept.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 11
When he awoke, shivering again, he saw from the
positions of the constellations overhead that it was
after midnight. The sea was still slick and almost flat
now, and beyond his feet propped on the rim of the raft
a shimmering path of light stretched away toward a
waning moon hung low in the eastern sky. He sat up to
stretch his cramped muscles, and when he turned he
saw the ship, not more than a mile away.
His first thought was that he must be dreaming. He
rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the beard
stab his salt-ravaged face, and looked again. It was
real. But there was something wrong. When he realized
what it was he had to choke down the cry pushing up
into his throat. He could see only a stern light. It was
going away from him. It had already passed, only
minutes ago, while he slept.
No! How could it? He looked around at the placid
unruffled sea. It would have passed within a few
hundred yards, and the bow wave would have tossed
the raft end over end like a bit of flotsam. There wasn’t
even a trace of wake anywhere. He was almost directly
astern of the ship, but it hadn’t gone by him. The only
answer was that it was lying dead in the water. It had
stopped for something, and had swung around as it lost
steerage-way. Unless, he thought, his mind was already
playing him tricks and there wasn’t any ship there at
all.
And The Deep Blue Sea — 12
2
Madeleine Darrington Lennox was lying naked on her
bunk in the sweltering darkness of Cabin C when she
heard the engine stop and wondered what was wrong
with the stupid ship now. She didn’t care particularly
except to the extent the stoppage might affect the
rendezvous whose anticipation had made it almost
impossible for her to lie still since she had switched out
the light a half hour ago and begun her nightly wait for
Barset to slip down the passageway and into the cabin.
It had been her experience that when anything
happened to break the routine of a ship, even on the
midnight-to-four watch, there were apt to be people
abroad in the passageways either seeking information
or trying to right the matter, whatever it was, and
Barset was too shrewd to run the risk of being seen by
one of the deck officers or perhaps the captain himself.
Laying the passengers was no part of the steward’s
duties, no matter how great his virtuosity in this field,
and as he put it with his gift for unprintable vulgarity,
Holy Joe would defecate a ring around himself. So he
might not come. And if he didn’t, in the state she was in
now she’d need three of the capsules to get to sleep.
There was no air-conditioning, and the cabin would
have been stifling in any event here in the tropics, but
it was made worse by the fact she had closed the
And The Deep Blue Sea — 13
porthole, as she always did in anticipation of these
delights, because it opened onto a deck outside, with no
privacy at all if anybody happened to be out there. The
door was closed all the way, too, instead of being on the
hook, because he could open it and slip in a fraction of
a second faster that way rather than having to fumble
with the hook. The electric fan mounted on the
bulkhead beyond the foot of her bunk was an oscillating
type, sweeping an intermittent flow of air across her
perspiring body, but there was nothing cooling about it;
it was merely in motion. She didn’t mind the heat a
great deal, however; it merely excited her, as did the
vibration of a ship. Face it, she thought, what doesn’t?
There was complete silence except for the faint
whirring of the fan and now and then a muted clanging
sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship.
Suppose he didn’t come? How the hell was she going to
get through the night like this, sleeping pills or no
sleeping pills? Sometimes she could bring herself to
orgasm by thinking about it, but she couldn’t always
depend on it, and going that far without the final
release always left her half crazy. She started twisting
on the bunk again, but at that moment the door opened
quickly and he was framed in it for an instant against
the lighted passageway. It closed, and the darkness was
complete again.
He said nothing. She flicked on the lighter and
reached for a cigarette with a show of nonchalance she
was aware didn’t fool him any more than it did her.
With no more than an amused and condescending
glance in her direction, he unbelted and slipped out of
the seersucker robe which was the only thing he had on
aside from the slippers. The flame cut off, but she could
still see him in her mind’s eye, a bony middle-aged man
with a sharp face and thinning blond hair combed
diagonally back over a bald spot. She’d told him once
that he reminded her of a ferret, to which he’d merely
laughed and said it took one to know one; ferrets and
mink were of the same family.
He walked over and stood naked beside the bunk,
only a pale blur in the darkness. She put out a hand,
touching his hip, and slid it diagonally downward. God,
And The Deep Blue Sea — 14
who would ever believe it? She took another shaky puff
of the cigarette, fighting herself, and asked, with
beautifully simulated indifference, ‘Why are we
stopped?’
‘That shaft bearing again,’ Barset replied. ‘So the
chief says.’
‘Whatever a shaft bearing is,’ she said idly. With
another movement of the hand, she murmured, ‘You’re
so accommodating, darling.’
‘Have you decided yet?’ he asked. ‘Whether it’s me or
not?’
‘I’m not annoying you, am I, Steward?’ She couldn’t
resist the ‘Steward’, even though it was risky. Once
he’d merely turned and gone back to his own cabin,
leaving her in torment, knowing she would apologize
the next day for whatever snotty remark she’d made,
that she’d crawl if she had to. But how much of that
lordly condescension could you take? ‘I assure you I’m
filled with all the awe to which you’re accustomed, but
this is the only way I can express it. Being by nature
shy and inarticulate—’
‘Turn it off,’ he said.
We cone to bury Caesar, not to praise him, she
thought, but didn’t say it. The chances were he’d not
only never heard the joke, but hadn’t even heard of
Shakespeare. He lay down beside her and slid a hand
between her thighs to spread them.
‘And put out that stupid cigarette,’ he added.
She stubbed out the cigarette with a shaky hand,
hurriedly, scarcely able to breathe now. The widow, she
thought, of a man who was eleventh in his class at the
Academy and commanding officer of a cruiser when he
retired. Oh! Oh! Oh, God!
* * *
In Cabin D, Karen Brooke had been asleep, but she
awoke when the engine stopped and the ship’s
vibration ceased. She lay for a moment wondering what
had happened, but decided it probably wasn’t serious.
Her door was on the hook and the porthole open, and
And The Deep Blue Sea — 15
she could hear no running footsteps or voices which
might indicate an emergency of some kind. She could
remember her father telling her when she was a little
girl that a ship’s engines stopping at sea, while rare,
wasn’t particularly alarming, but if she ever heard them
go abruptly from full ahead to full astern to get on deck
and away from the bow as fast as she could. No doubt it
was just another breakdown in the engine room; there
had been two stoppages, one for twelve hours, since
their departure from Callao six days ago.
She had the wind-scoop out the porthole, but now
that the ship had come to rest it picked up no air at all
and it was suffocatingly hot inside the cabin, even with
the whirring of the fan. It would be some relief to take
off the cotton pajamas she was wearing, but that would
mean drawing the curtains over the porthole. They
scrubbed down the deck outside very early in the
morning, and five feet seven of sleeping nude blonde
might cause God knows what havoc among seamen
wielding forgotten fire hoses. Even a thirty-four-yearold
blonde, she thought; sailors a week at sea were
notoriously generous critics.
She heard a door open and close, and then a murmur
of voices, one of them male, just beyond the bulkhead
in Cabin D. She winced. Oh, no, not again! Not tonight!
You’d think that now the ship stopped, in this complete
silence without the throb of the engine and the
vibration to lend at least an illusion of privacy to their
lovemaking, they might be a little more discreet.
She felt trapped, embarrassed, and angry. The first
time it happened, the night they sailed from Callao, in
her revulsion at being a captive audience to the
impassioned grapplings and ecstatic shrieks from
beyond the bulkhead, she had buried her head under
her pillow and suffered through it. Mrs. Lennox was
aware that she occupied Cabin D, so it was obvious she
just didn’t realize how sound-transparent that flimsy
bulkhead really was. The next day, when she was sure
the other woman was in her cabin, she had gone
bustling around her own, singing fragments of song,
dropping a book, creating other small sounds which
should carry the message without being too obvious
And The Deep Blue Sea — 16
about it. It had done no good at all. The next night was
a repetition of the first, and the following was even
worse, with the result that by now she was afraid to
make any sound in her cabin at all. Just once, it could
be assumed without too much embarrassment on either
side that she’d been asleep, but that was impossible
now, after nearly a week of it. She wasn’t certain that
even Mrs. Lennox herself was aware of some of the
things she cried out in her transports, but any
recognition between them now that they’d been
overheard would be mutually humiliating to the point
their one desire would be never to see each other
again. Which would be somewhat awkward under the
circumstances; the old freighter was a small ship, they
were the only women on it, and it was a long way to
Manila.
With the initial moan from the other cabin she sat up
wearily and reached for her robe. The only escape was
in flight, but she was damned if she’d get dressed
again. Belting it around her, she dropped cigarettes
and a lighter in the pockets, located her slippers in the
darkness, and went out, softly closing the door behind
her. Her hair was a mess, and she had on no makeup,
but she was too angry to care. The worst of it was that
by leaving her cabin she was committed to staying
away until she was certain the man, whoever he was,
would have left. It would be embarrassing in the
extreme to meet him in the passageway coming out of
Mrs. Lennox’ cabin at this hour of the morning.
She’d thought once or twice of asking the steward or
captain if she could move to another cabin, but always
ran into the unanswerable question of what excuse she
could give. Besides, it would have to be a double cabin,
and she’d paid only for a single. While there were only
four passengers aboard and the Leander had
accommodations for twelve in four double cabins and
four singles, they were all people travelling alone, so
only the doubles were unoccupied.
Her cabin was the last one aft in the starboard
passageway. There was no one in sight. She turned into
the thwartships passageway, went on past the entrance
to the dining saloon on her left, and stepped out on
And The Deep Blue Sea — 17
deck on the port side. This level, referred to in the
usual grandiose language of travel brochures as the
promenade deck, contained the eight passenger cabins,
the steward’s cabin, and the passenger dining and
smoking saloons. On the next deck below were the
crew’s quarters and messrooms, while the deck officers
and engineers occupied the one directly above, along
with their messroom and the wireless room. Passengers
were encouraged to stay in their own area, except that
they were allowed on the boat deck, the uppermost
one, as long as they kept clear of the bridge.
She went around to the ladders at the after end of the
midships house and mounted to the boat deck, which
was in darkness except for the faint moonlight, since
the bridge was at the forward end of it. Between the
two wings of the bridge was the wheelhouse, the rest of
the structure aft of it containing the chartroom and
captain’s quarters. She walked forward and stood
leaning against the rail between the davits of the two
lifeboats on the starboard side, gazing out at the starstudded
night and the dark, unmoving surface of the
sea.
Three bells struck in the wheelhouse, repeated a few
seconds later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. It was
one thirty. The lookout reported the running lights, and
was acknowledged by the second officer, whose
shadowy figure she could see on the starboard wing of
the bridge. For a moment she considered walking
forward far enough to ask him why they were stopped,
but decided against it. He was a dour and taciturn man
she had seen only once or twice since she’d been
aboard, and she wasn’t even sure he spoke much
English. The chief mate was the only one of the officers
she knew, since he sometimes ate in the passengers’
saloon, along with the captain.
From the engine room ventilators behind her issued
the faint pulsing sounds of the generator and sanitary
pump, but aside from these the ship was caught up in
an almost total silence. There wasn’t the whisper of a
breeze, and no movement at all. She could be standing
on a pier, she thought, or a seawall. She looked down.
When the ship was under way at night here in the
And The Deep Blue Sea — 18
tropics she loved to watch the glowing sheet of light
along its skin, but it was absent now that there was no
disturbance of the water, and there were only random
pinpoints of phosphorescence winking on and off like
fireflies in the darkness. She leaned on the rail and
stared moodily off into the night. After a while she
heard footsteps coming across the deck behind her, and
turned. It was the chief mate.
Even in the darkness it was impossible to mistake
that figure. He must be six feet four, she thought; at
any rate he dwarfed everyone else aboard, not only tall
but massive of shoulder, with powerful arms and a big,
craggy head and wild mop of blond hair that seemed to
fly outward as though charged by some endless source
of energy within him. In spite of his size, he moved with
the casual ease of the perfectly co-ordinated, and there
was in all his mannerisms and in the rather sardonic,
ice-blue eyes a sort of total male confidence that no
doubt innumerable women had found attractive. She
wondered what he was doing up at this hour, since he
didn’t go on watch until four. Maybe he was the man—
She wrenched her mind away from this speculation
with distaste.
He saw her between the boats and stopped. ‘Ready to
abandon ship, Mrs. Brooke? Stick around; we can still
beat the lifeboats.’
She smiled. ‘I was just out admiring the night. I woke
up when the engines stopped.’
‘Everybody does. Sudden silence is a noise.’
‘Is it anything serious?’
‘No, just a hot bearing. The galley slaves say we’ll be
under way in a half hour or so.’
She took out a cigarette. ‘The who?’
He snapped the lighter for her, and grinned. ‘Engine
room. The first marine engineer was a convict with an
oar.’
He went on toward the bridge, and she resumed her
silent contemplation of the night. He was an unusual
man in a number of ways, she thought; he was
obviously well educated, and she knew he spoke fluent
And The Deep Blue Sea — 19
French and German in addition to English. She didn’t
know what his nationality was. The Leander was under
Panamanian registry, but her crew was from
everywhere. His name was Eric Lind, so he was
probably of Scandinavian descent, as she was herself.
Then it was her own reaction—or utter lack of it—that
she was thinking of. What woman, talking to a
devilishly attractive man in the moonlight, even if she
had no interest in him at all, would indifferently invite
inspection in the revealing, close-up flame of a
cigarette lighter when her hair looked like a fright wig
and her face like something that had been stored for
the winter in a coat of grease? You’re hopeless, she
thought.
* * *
The ship loomed large and distinct ahead of him now,
and he knew he was within a quarter mile. She was still
lying motionless in the water, but had swung around by
imperceptible degrees during the past hour until she
was broadside to him, and he could see the green glow
of her starboard running light as well as the overall
silhouette and a few lighted portholes. She was a
freighter, with well-decks forward and aft of the big
midships house, and whatever her trouble was it must
be in the engine room. There was no sign of fire, or
activity of any kind on deck.
Sweat ran into his eyes. There was a sharp pain in his
side, making every breath an agony, and his mouth was
dry and full of the taste of copper. His hands were on
the inflated rim of the raft, pushing it ahead of him as
he swam. The dungarees and shirt were inside the raft,
and he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts.
Normally, he had no particular fear of sharks, but he
knew that what he was doing was tantamount to asking
to be cut in two, threshing on the surface at night like
something wounded and helpless. Well, if one took his
legs off, it would be over in a few minutes at most; that
beat the other program, the thirst.
Between the lash of urgency and the gray sea of
fatigue that was engulfing him, he was conscious of
And The Deep Blue Sea — 20
random and disconnected thoughts that made him
wonder again if he were entirely rational. There was a
haunting impression of déjà vu about the whole thing
that baffled him, since neither he nor anybody else in
maritime history, as far as he knew, had ever been
rescued by swimming over to a stationary ship in midocean
and asking for a lift. Ahoy aboard the freighter!
You going my way? He giggled, and his fright at this
was sufficient to clear his mind momentarily.
He knew then when he had done this before. It was at
the hospital after the highway patrol had got Gerry out
of the wreckage of the Porsche and called him at the
studio, and he had sat in a small room at Emergency
with his whole being concentrated like a laser beam
into a single state of wanting, of trying to control with
an effort of will something that was out of his hands.
When the intern and resident had come out and told
him she was dead, he had known he would never want
anything again. It was all used up. But apparently there
was always a little left somewhere, because this was
the same thing again. Either the ship would remain
there motionless in the water until he reached it, or it
wouldn’t. They couldn’t see him in the darkness, and he
had no way to signal it.
Three hundred yards. Two hundred. He could see the
silhouette of the stowed booms now, and one of the
lighted portholes winked off momentarily as though
somebody had walked in front of it, but it was still too
far and too dark to make out any movement on deck or
on the bridge. He tried to increase the beat of his
scissoring legs, but he was too near complete collapse.
He sobbed for breath. Then, almost as clearly as though
he were aboard, he heard the ding, ding, pause, ding,
ding, of four bells from the wheelhouse, repeated a
moment later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. The
lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he
thought. Just a few more minutes. Then there was
another sound, the ringing of a telephone, and he felt
the hackles lift on his neck. Engine room calling the
bridge? He kicked ahead.
It was less than a hundred yards now. Then he heard
the sound that struck terror in his heart, the jingle of
And The Deep Blue Sea — 21
the engine room telegraph. He tried to shout, but he
had no breath. A great boil of water appeared under
her counter, and he could hear the massive vibration
set up by the engine going full ahead while she was still
lying dead in the water. He clawed his way onto the raft
and stood on his knees, fighting for breath so he could
scream at them. They couldn’t hear him over the
vibration. She began to move. He shouted, endlessly
now, feeling himself engulfed in madness. She gathered
way, beginning to swing to his right to get back on
course, and her counter went past. Turbulence from the
propeller spread outward, rocking the raft and spinning
it around as she drew away from him in the night.
* * *
The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with
the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard
the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of
them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine
room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and
there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships
structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead.
Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she
heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in
front of her. She moved back to the railing between the
boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the
faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam
as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn.
She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she
gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the
surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away.
Extending upwards from it was the unmistakable
silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She
stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the
ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for
several seconds in the path of light and there could be
no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran
towards the bridge The second mate was just emerging
from the wheelhouse.
‘A man!’ she cried out, pointing. ‘There’s a man out
there, on a raft or something.’
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