Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  All right, he thought savagely; maybe you should have sent one of the men. He brought them back.

  It was a mast.

  Or was it? Orpheus rolled, and in the sickening swing out to port and back he lost the spot again. He got the line of the horizon in the glasses once more and inched to the right. There! It was only a tiny pencil stroke seen for an instant against the red glow of sunset. He locked his arms more tightly around the mast in an effort to stop the tremor of the glasses. It came into view, and this time he was certain he saw the other one beside it, the two of them like the tips of two toothpicks held at arm’s length before a fire. The shorter one was to the left.

  “Lower away!” he shouted.

  He knew what they had to do and made up his mind as he came down the mast. Below him, the others looked up silently, their faces almost red in the winy light. He landed on the boom, stepped out of the sling, and jumped down beside them.

  “She’s over there,” he began. When they started to interrupt, he cut them off with a curt gesture. “Wait till I get through. She’s going to miss us. She’s hull down, even from up there; all I got was a glimpse of the masts against the sunset. She’s due west of us, headed north, and she won’t get any closer. From where she is, down on deck, we’re clear over the horizon, so there s no way in God’s world she can see us—”

  “There’s no way we can signal her?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

  “Just one. Set this one afire.”

  “Oh.” She gave him a startled look, and then she was calm again. “Could she see it from over there?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?” Bellew interrupted. “That’s great.”

  “Shut up.” He went on. “There’s a good chance. We’re to the east of her, so it’ll be dark behind us in another fifteen minutes. And there are enough clouds overhead to reflect the glow.”

  “And if she doesn’t see us?” Bellew asked. “But don’t bother to tell me, let me guess. We take a taxi to the McAlpin Hotel—”

  “We do the same thing we’re going to do anyway,” Ingram said coldly. “We drown. The water’s gained at least three inches on us in the past half-hour, with all three of us working. She won’t last till midnight.” They were wasting time with this idiotic argument. He swung around to Mrs. Warriner. “It’s your yacht, and you’re still aboard it—”

  “Burn it, of course,” she said coolly.

  Bellew shrugged. “Okay. What are we waiting for?”

  “Will it burn?” she asked. “I mean, this low in the water, and with everything up here wet from the squall?”

  “We’ll fire it in the chartroom,” Ingram replied. “There’s no gasoline left at all?”

  “No.”

  “What does your galley stove burn? Bottled gas, or kerosene?”

  “Kerosene. There should be several cans of it in the locker forward.”

  “Right. What about paint stores—turpentine, linseed oil, thinner?”

  “There should be some of each.”

  “Good.” He began to issue terse orders. “Get your passports, money, and the logbook; you can’t take anything else. Wrap them in something waterproof. Dump the water out of that dinghy and stow ‘em in there, along with a couple of flashlights. Put on lifebelts, and then you can give me a hand.”

  Without even waiting for a reply, he whirled and ran down into the chartroom. He grabbed a flashlight from its bracket and went on down the steps and through the main and forward cabins, where the debris-laden water washed around his thighs. Opposite the sail bin was another locker. He unlatched the doors and yanked them open but could see nothing in the thickening gloom here below. He switched on the flashlight and wedged it between two of the sailbags. In an upper compartment were some tools and paint brushes. He spied a small hand ax and stuck the handle of it in his belt. The bottom of the locker was filled with buckets and rectangular one-gallon cans submerged and bumping together in the water that surged back and forth.

  The buckets would be paint. He ignored them and began fishing out the cans. There were a dozen of them, mostly unidentifiable, the labels long since washed off, but it didn’t matter. An armful at a time, he carried them up the ladder going on deck from the forward cabin and dumped them beside the hatch. As he made the last trip he saw that Bellew and Mrs. Warriner had returned to the deck, wearing lifebelts, and Bellew had the dinghy up on its side, pouring the water out of it.

  The great flame in the west was dying now, and the brief twilight of the tropics had already begun. He grabbed up two of the cans and ran aft.

  “What now?” Bellew asked.

  “Let’s get the dinghy over.” With a swing of the hand ax he knocked out one of the windows of the deckhouse and tossed the two cans in on the chartroom table. Mrs. Warriner was holding two flashlights and a package wrapped in oilskins. As she stowed them in the dinghy he noticed the compass had fallen out when Bellew had dumped out the water. It wasn’t broken. He put it back in.

  “Grab the bow,” he said to Bellew. They lifted it over the lifeline and, when Orpheus rolled down, set it in the water. It rode lightly on the heavy swell passing beneath them. He handed the painter to Mrs. Warriner. “Take it aft and just wait. Keep it fended off so it doesn’t get caught under the counter.”

  Whirling to Bellew, he said, “Bring up a couple of those spare sails from the locker. It doesn’t matter which ones. Dump ‘em there alongside the mainmast. And then bring all those cans aft, the ones around the forward hatch.”

  “Where do you want ‘em?” Bellew asked.

  “Just forward of the cockpit’s all right.” He turned and ran down the steps into the chartroom. Quick blows of the hand ax knocked out the rest of the windows. He began yanking drawers out of the chart table and smashing them with the ax after he had dumped out the charts. He tore charts into strips until he had a great armful of paper. He piled this on a corner of the table and threw the splintered drawers on top of it. With another blow of the ax he cut through one of the cans. As the liquid gushed out, he could tell by the smell of it that it was paint-thinner. He poured it over the paper and wood and cut open the other can. This one was kerosene. He swung it, splashing the bulkheads, the deck, and the table. Grabbing up another chart, he nicked his cigar lighter. The lighter was wet and required several attempts before it worked. He held it to the corner of the chart and, when it was burning, tossed it on the pile. With a great sucking sound it all burst into flame at once. He threw the rest of the charts on it and ran out.

  Bellew had the two sailbags piled beside the mainmast now and was hurrying back and forth, carrying the cans aft. With his knife open, beginning at the end of the boom, Ingram went forward, slicing through the gaskets of the furled mainsail. When he reached the mast he unshackled the sling and made the halyard fast to the head of the sail again. Two more quick slashes split the sailbags. He hauled the sails out and stretched them along the deck, one atop the other. He grabbed up a line at random, cut off a length, made it fast around the two sails somewhere near the center, and hauled the whole cumbersome bundle over to the base of the mast. He made the line fast to the halyard above the shackle.

  Bellew was passing then with the last of the cans. He grabbed two of them from his arms and swung the ax on them. The first was linseed oil. He poured it on the two sails. The other was kerosene. He dumped this on them also, and onto the mainsail, which was dangling in folds along the boom. He could hear the fire beginning to roar below him now, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows. “Give me a hand on this halyard,” he called out to Bellew.

  They hoisted. The mainsail went up, and with it the great dangling mass of the two spare sails made fast to the head of it. Kerosene and linseed oil began to drip on them.

  Bellew grunted. “For that real homey feeling, it ought to be gasoline.”

  “If it breaks out of the chartroom,” Ingram said, “go right over the side;”

  “Don’t give it a thought, sport. I just look stupid.”
/>
  It was up. Ingram threw the hitches on the pin, and they ran aft. Flame was beginning to lick through the broken windows. “Into the dinghy,” he ordered and nodded to Bellew. “You first. Take the oars.” Bellew stepped down into it and held it while he helped Mrs. Warriner in.

  She protested. “Aren’t you going to get in?”

  “It won’t take three; it’ll capsize.”

  “But you haven’t even got a lifebelt—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t need one. Pull clear and wait for me. I want this thing to go all at once, and go high—the higher the better. Get going.” He waved them off. Bellew shipped the oars and they began to draw away in the thickening dusk, heaving up and down on the swell.

  There were eight of the rectangular cans on deck at the forward end of the cockpit. He set them up on end one at a time and began swinging the ax. The first was spar varnish. He picked it up and threw it forward. It landed just beyond the mainmast and slid, spilling its contents along the deck. The next was kerosene. It went up the other side of the deck. Turpentine. It followed the varnish. Paint-thinner. That was the trigger, the most volatile of them all. He set it aside, upright on the cockpit seat with his knee braced against it so it wouldn’t turn over and spill. Linseed oil. He threw it forward.

  It bounced and slid, spraying along the deck. The whole interior of the chartroom was a roaring mass of flame now, and he could feel the heat on his face. The varnish on the underside of the main boom was beginning to bubble. He had to hurry. There were only seconds left before it broke out through the roof.

  He swung the ax on another can, and another. Some of them had already slid overboard, but their contents had spilled, and the whole deck forward of him was crisscrossed with trails of varnish, linseed oil, turpentine, and kerosene, flowing across the planks and soaking into the seams. The final can was another of paint-thinner. He dropped the ax and picked it up, along with the other can, the one beside his knee.

  He ran to the after end of the cockpit and jumped up onto the narrow strip of deck right on the stern. All right, honey, this is where we are. Wheeling, he threw the first can straight through a window into the inferno inside the chartroom, and while it was still in the air he threw the other and dived over the side.

  Thirty yards away in the gathering night, Lillian Warriner turned and stared in wonder. My God, she thought, they shouldn’t match him against just one ocean at a time. Even while his body was still in the air, a great ball of flame burst out of the chartroom, taking the roof of the deckhouse with it and igniting the whole ketch forward of the cockpit in one mighty breath. Fire shot up the oil-soaked mainsail and ballooned in the two sails at the top of it to form—with the force of the explosion and the massive updraft from the heat below— a gigantic torch, a column of flame nearly a hundred feet high. It lit up the sea for a quarter-mile in every direction, and she could feel the heat of it on her skin.

  Then he was alongside, with a hand on the gunwale. He dropped his sneakers into the dinghy. They rose as a swell passed under them. “You haven’t got much freeboard,” he said, “but I think it’ll ride if you don’t make any sudden moves. If it does swamp, the flashlights are more important than your passports and money. Try to keep at least one of them out of the water. There’s no use staying here; keep rowing west.”

  Bellew turned his head, trying to see the dying band of color along the western horizon. “I’m blind,” he said, “with that glare in my face.”

  “Set the compass between your feet,” Ingram said to Mrs. Warriner. “Line it up with the bow, and hold a flashlight on it so he can see it.”

  She did. Bellew began to pull slowly ahead. Ingram held onto the transom very lightly with one hand and kicked with his feet. When they were a hundred yards away he turned and looked back. It was like a scene from hell, he thought, with the red glare reflected on the black and oily heaving of the sea. The first great pillar of flame had died now that the sails were gone, and they were already in the edge of the surrounding darkness, but she was burning fiercely from bow to stern. The glow in the sky would still be visible for miles.

  “Will it last long enough for her to get here?” Mrs. Warriner asked above him.

  “No,” he said. “It’ll burn to the waterline and sink in twenty minutes or so. It’ll take her an hour, or an hour and a half. But it doesn’t matter; she’ll take a bearing on it and have a compass course.”

  She made no reply. They went on toward the darkness. He thought she might turn for one last look, but she didn’t. She remained quite still, her face lowered over the compass between her feet. It was possible she was crying, but if she was, he thought, nobody would ever know it except her.

  The same question was in both their minds, he knew, the same dread of what they might find aboard Saracen. He thought of the shotgun and shivered.

  * * *

  She’d got under way again because she had to keep moving as long as she could. The silence was out there waiting for her, and once she stopped and killed the engine with the acceptance of final defeat she would be defenseless and she wasn’t sure she would survive it.

  It was 7:20 p.m. There was still enough faint light and dying color along the rim of the horizon to show her where west was, and there would continue to be, probably, for another ten minutes. Everywhere else it was already night. Across from her, Warriner’s naked shoulders and golden head were only a faint gleam in the darkness. She was standing up, holding the wheel with one hand and staring ahead into the north, when something flickered on the extreme edge of her peripheral vision. She turned her head and saw the little tongue of reddish light lick upward over the edge of the world far off to the eastward.

  For a second or two she could only stare at it in a sort of stunned disbelief. Then tears came up into her eyes and blinded her for an instant as this gave way to a great surge of joy, but by then she already had the wheel hard over and was coming around. She lined it up alongside the masts and reached for the throttle. The engine noise increased to a roar as it came up the final notch to full wide open.

  How far? She’d seen nothing there before, even with the binoculars, which meant it was clear over the horizon—six, eight, or even ten miles away. But John must have seen her against the sunset and then deliberately set Orpheus afire because he had no other way to signal her. The only way he could have seen her would have been from the masthead, so there were probably others aboard. But that was unimportant at the moment. She had something to guide her now. That was all that mattered.

  In another few minutes the little tip of flame was no longer showing over the horizon, but the glow was clearly visible against the sky. She felt a moment’s uneasiness. How long would it burn before it sank? If it were even eight miles away, it would take her nearly an hour and a half to get there. It was almost due east, but that was no help once the last of the light was gone from the west and all directions were the same. She had to have a star or some constellation she could recognize, one still low enough on the horizon to give her the direction. But ahead of her, above the glow, the sky was becoming overcast. Almost instinctively she glanced to the north before she remembered Polaris was below the horizon now. They were south of the equator.

  She turned to look astern, and saw the answer, if the sky remained clear enough in the west. Venus had just emerged from behind a cloud. It was perhaps three hours behind the sun, well down toward the horizon directly behind her. She faced forward, less worried now. Twenty minutes passed. The faint reddish glow was still visible ahead, reflected from the underside of the clouds above it. She kept it lined up beside the masts. It began to fade. Then, thirty-five minutes after she had first sighted it, it disappeared with the abruptness of a snuffed-out candle. Orpheus had gone down.

  Venus was still bright behind her. She went on. It was awkward and not very accurate, trying to steer looking over her shoulder, so she stood up, facing aft directly before the wheel, and tried to keep the planet poised over the end of the mizzen boom. She rea
ched inside the hatch and switched on the running lights. Venus began to disappear in the edge of another cloud. She tried to guess its bearing, but when it reappeared fifteen minutes later it was far around to starboard. She’d been running almost south.

  She swung the wheel to bring it astern again and turned herself, to look forward, searching the horizon on both sides and ahead for any tiny pinpoint of light. She must be within two or three miles of them. On all sides the darkness was unbroken. Then Venus faded and disappeared again. The western sky was becoming overcast. Directly overhead stars were visible through holes in the clouds but there was nothing anywhere that was low enough on the horizon to guide her. In two more minutes she was hopelessly lost, with no more knowledge of direction than if she were at the bottom of a well.

  She jerked the throttle back and threw the engine out of gear. It was absolutely imperative now that she stay exactly where she was; every turn of the propeller could be taking her away from them instead of nearer. She pulled the twisted wires apart to stop the engine’s noise so she could listen as she climbed atop the main boom to search the darkness all around. There was no light, no cry. She came down from the boom and ran below for a can of flares.

  * * *

  There was no fire behind them now; Orpheus had gone down nearly fifteen minutes ago. “Still nothing,” Mrs. Warriner said above him in the darkness. Each time they crested a swell she searched the sea ahead, while Bellew continued to pull at the oars.

  “What time is it now?” he asked.

  She held her watch under the beam of the flashlight. “Eight-ten.”

  It had been fifty minutes. They should have picked up Saracen’s masthead light by now. “You’ve got too much light under you,” he said. “Hold the flashlight by the lens so it’s completely covered by your hand except one spot right over the compass. Bellew will still be able to see it. Then put that bundle of oilskins across your lap so no light seeps up at all. And when you locate the horizon, don’t look directly at it; look a little above. Night vision’s better out of the edges of your eyes.”