Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  “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 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  10:14 AM 226 degrees Est. speed 6 knots

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

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

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

  How was she going to get control of it?

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

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

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

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

  Then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was then she remembered the shotgun.

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