Blind panic seized him for a moment, and he had already taken two or three frenzied strokes after the ship before he got it under control. He didn’t know whether it was his hatred of Lind and contempt for Rafferty, or whether he was still partially immunized by the massive charges of adrenaline, but he was able to stop the ludicrous flailing of his arms. No doubt he would panic at the end or go completely out of his mind when he saw the ship go over the horizon, but at least he could do it in private. He treaded water instead, and turned to search the sea behind him. There wasn’t much chance he would see her, though, even if she were still afloat. She would be several hundred yards astern, only a head showing above the surface and still below the intervening billows of the swell. Only, he thought, if they both rose to a crest at the same time.
He was still being thrown about in the diminishing turbulence of the wake, and now he was facing toward the ship again. He stared unbelievingly. It was well over a hundred yards away, but it was beginning to swing in a hard-over turn to port, and he could see two figures out on the port wing of the bridge, undeniably looking back at him. Gooseflesh spread between his shoulder blades, but he killed the cruel surge of hope before it had time to start. It was only somebody who hadn’t heard the word. Then he saw the big figure that could only be Eric Lind, running up the ladder to the boat deck. The word was on its way.
* * *
Antonio Gutierrez, the Filipino messman, had just emerged from the passageway at the after end of the crew’s deck when he thought he heard something splash in the water on the starboard side. He walked over and looked down, but could see nothing; Rafferty was a hundred feet aft by that time and still below the surface. He looked off momentarily toward the squall, and was about to turn away when a gilt sandal fell past his face, followed by another, and then a long and very beautiful pair of legs dropped into view and stopped, suspended in front of his eyes so near he could have touched them if he had been capable of movement.
Apparently performing some sort of airy dance to unheard music, they were slender and tanned, and nude all the way to the fragment of white nylon at their juncture, and could belong only to the pretty blonde one he had embraced so often in the fantasies of his nights. He heard voices on the deck above him then, a shout, and a sound of tearing cloth, and she dropped past him and fell into the sea. There were more sounds from above, and then a cry in the well-deck below. He drew a shaking hand across his face and looked down to see a tall figure running toward the ladder, carrying some kind of strange pistol in his hand. It was the dead man they had buried two days ago.
Harald Svedberg, the young third mate, didn’t know a word of Spanish or Tagalog, and even if he had it is doubtful he would have made any sense of the chaotic outpouring about dancing legs and ghosts with pistols and naked women falling so close you could reach out like that and touch them, but there is something universally compelling about the pointed finger, even that of an obvious madman. The eye follows involuntarily. He looked aft in the direction indicated by the stabbing and palsied hand and saw Goddard’s head in the white water of the wake.
‘Hard left!’ he called out to the helmsman. He lifted the life ring from its bracket on the port wing of the bridge, yanked loose the canister, and threw them outward.
* * *
Goddard saw the ship steady up from her turn to port and then begin to swing back to starboard, as he had known she would as soon as Lind had reached the bridge. Almost at the same time he spotted the white circle of the life ring as it rose to the crest of a swell ahead of him, its attached flare glowing feebly in the sunlight.
Kicking off his slippers, he began to swim toward it. When he had reached it, the Leander had steadied up again and was back on course, going straight away from him a quarter mile ahead, trailing a plume of smoke from her ventilators as she headed into the dark line of the rain squall beyond. He tore his eyes from her, took the knife from his pocket, and cut loose the canister and its flare. Letting the knife drop, he tore off the shirt and the encumbering flannel slacks.
From here, where the Leander had started her first turn, the wake ran straight back, traces of it still visible for several hundred yards. With no conscious thought as to why he was doing it, he slipped inside the ring, pushed straight down on it with both hands to give himself all the buoyancy possible, and raised his head as high as he could to look back along the line of the wake. He was lifted by a gentle swell, and then another, and it was while the third was passing under him that he was sure he saw her, a golden dot in the immensity of blue behind him. He dropped away down the slope and began to rise again, and this time there was no doubt. He marked her position against the edge of a cloud formation beyond, and began to swim back to her, towing the life ring.
It was slow work, but he had covered what he thought must be half the distance and had paused momentarily to hold onto the ring and rest when the question finally occurred to him. In the name of God, why? Wasn’t it more merciful to let her drown? Unconsciousness came in probably less than a minute, and then it was over. Wasn’t that better than four or five days, and ultimate madness and death by thirst?
He looked around then, and the Leander was gone, swallowed up in the squall, and he was only a speck in all this vast and aching void. He began kicking ahead, hurrying now, driven by fear that he might be too late. Each time he rose to the crest of a swell he looked anxiously ahead in the direction she had to be. Then he saw her. She rose to the top of a swell less than fifty yards away, only the back of her head visible above the surface.
She disappeared, and looked as though she had gone under. No, she’d probably just dropped away behind the swell. He threshed ahead. He saw her again, closer now, but she was in trouble. She went under, and he could see her struggling weakly. A hand came out. Then her face emerged for a few seconds. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth opened as she tried to gulp for air, water ran into it, and she sank from sight. She didn’t come up again. He was still twenty yards away.
Gasping for breath himself and driven by the awful compulsion to hurry, he tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot as he flailed ahead, but it was next to impossible in the tilting planes of the swell. He was above it, then cut off from it, and then below it. The sun was in his face, glaring off the surface and making it impossible to see beneath. The only thing to do was go beyond, and turn, with the sun over his shoulder so he could see down. He should be over it now. He lunged on for a few more strokes, and swung around, searching frantically. It might already be too late.
Luck was with him; he saw her almost at once. A swell passed under him, and with the sun’s rays striking almost perpendicularly into the plane of its retreating slope, it was like looking into a shop window. A flash of gold caught the corner of his eye off to the right, and he turned, and she was only three or four feet below the surface less than ten feet away. He swam over and dived, twined his fingers in the aureole of blonde hair streaming outward from her head, and kicked to the surface.