“About eight months ago,” she replied. “When we bought her.”
Well, that figured; it matched everything else about this expedition. He stepped down into the doghouse and dug a chart of the South Pacific out of the litter on the deck. Even if they weren’t going anywhere, they had to have a position, a point of departure. Their last position should be in the logbook, but he didn’t trust their navigation. He’d had a good fix from three star sights just at dusk last night; from that, by dead reckoning, they’d made twenty-five miles along a course of 235 degrees. That should be Saracen’s position at dawn when he’d sighted Orpheus. She was—call it five miles away, on a bearing of 315. That would put her here.
He penciled a cross on the chart: 4.20 South latitude, 123.30 West longitude. The Marquesas were roughly twelve hundred miles to the west southwest, the Galapagos over two thousand miles behind them, and elsewhere nothing but thousands of miles of empty ocean. The chances of their being sighted by a ship were to all practical purposes nonexistent.
And as for ever catching up with Saracen, even if they could find her … Face it, he thought. She was already far over the horizon, making six knots under power. And when her fuel ran out, she could still outsail this waterlogged hulk with nothing but her mizzen and somebody’s shirt.
“The wind’s heading us,” Mrs. Warriner called out from the cockpit. He went back on deck. The breeze had veered around to the southwest, and she had bare steerageway on a course that was now a little east of south.
“We’ll come about,” he said. He cast off the genoa sheet, carried the sail forward around the stay and outside the starboard shrouds, and trimmed the sheet on the port tack. They were steering 275 now, which was 35 degrees to the west of the course they wanted. But in a few minutes the wind went further around to the southward and they were able to come down to 245. Then it died out momentarily and sprang up again out of the northwest. He carried the genoa around again. Ten minutes later the wind began to soften once more, and then died with complete finality. Orpheus slogged forward a few feet, came to rest, and began to roll heavily in the trough. He looked around the horizon. In every direction the surface of the ocean had the slick, hot glare of polished steel.
They’d made less than a mile. It was 12:10 p.m.
* * *
Her face hurt. It was lying on something hard that went up and down and wove back and forth the way the floor had the only time in her life she’d ever been drunk, and there was that same sick feeling in her stomach. Somewhere a long way off there was an engine sort of noise that seemed to have been going on forever, and just audible above it, or through it, a voice was singing. It was an old, very sentimental popular song, one she hadn’t heard for years, but it was still familiar. What was it? Oh. “Charmaine.” That was it. She rolled over. Some powerful light glared beyond her closed eyelids, and she grasped that it was sunlight. She opened them and squinted with pain. Just beyond her was a pair of wide and very sun-tanned shoulders surmounted by a gold-thatched head. At the same moment the head turned, still singing, and Hughie Warriner regarded her with concern, which gave way to evident relief. He smiled. It was a charming and affectionate smile, and there was something almost chiding about it. She tried to scream, or to move, but could do neither.
The song stopped. “See, you’re all right,” he said. “Now aren’t you sorry you made me do it?”
6
John wasn’t here. The paralysis of shock snapped then, and she screamed. “Where are we? Where are you going? We’ve got to go back!”
Warriner gave no indication he’d even heard her. She tried to sit up and was assailed by vertigo. The ocean tilted while nausea ballooned inside her, and she collapsed, fighting to keep from being sick. She closed her eyes for an instant to stop the whirling, and when she opened them Warriner had turned forward again to look into the compass. He was sitting in the helmsman’s seat in the back of the cockpit, just beyond her legs. He reached a hand around and caught her left ankle, not tightly or roughly, but merely as though to soothe her or to reassure himself she hadn’t disappeared.
She cringed and tried to scuttle backward, but there was nowhere to go; behind her was only the sea. She was cut off; she couldn’t reach the wheel or the ignition switch, or even the rest of the boat, without getting past him. There was nothing to hit him with, even if she had the strength.
The hand slid down her ankle and was caressing her bare foot. He turned around again. “You have such beautiful feet,” he said. “And women so seldom do. I mean, they do to start with, but they ruin them. Especially European women.”
She could only stare in horror.
“In fact, I’ve often wondered if Gauguin didn’t run away to Polynesia simply because he was revolted by the feet of European models.” His eyes sought hers in a glance that was amused and intimate, as though they shared some secret joke. “Of course it’s silly. It’s just something you say to clods at cocktail parties.”
Dear God, how did you get through to him? “Listen!” She made it to a sitting position this time, lurched once as Saracen rolled, and caught herself with a hand on the lifeline. “Please! We’ve got to go back! Don’t you understand? Turn around. Turn. Like this.” She made a lateral motion with her free hand, as though trying to explain the mechanics of wheel-turning to an idiot or to someone who spoke another language. She realized immediately this was wrong, but was too frantic to know how to correct it. She went on, the words tumbling over each other in her haste. “Let me! Let me take it!”
“No.” The smile disappeared. He gave a petulant little shrug, as though she had disappointed him, and faced forward to stare into the binnacle again.
She turned and looked wildly astern. How far had they come? At first she couldn’t even see the other boat and felt herself begin to give way to panic. Then she made it out, almost hull down on the horizon directly behind them. There was no chance at all of seeing the dinghy at that distance, and she didn’t know what had become of John. Except that he wasn’t here, and they were already nearly three miles away and going farther with every minute. She was the only chance he had. She turned back and caught Warriner’s shoulder. “Go back! We’ve got to go back!”
He brushed her hand off. “Please, Mrs. Ingram, do you have to shout? You’re being unreasonable again.”
“Un—un—Oh, God!” She tried to calm herself; if she went to pieces she’d never get through to him. “Unreasonable? Can’t you understand? My husband’s back there. We can’t go off and leave him. He’ll drown.”
Warriner dismissed the whole subject of Ingram with an abstracted wave of the hand. “He won’t drown.”
“But the boat’s sinking—”
“It probably won’t. Anyway, he wanted to go aboard there, didn’t he? It’s his own fault.” He turned and looked at her, as though puzzled by her refusal to grasp so obvious a fact. Then he went on, as if talking to himself. “My trouble has always been that I trust people too much. I don’t see their real motives until too late…”
It was hopeless, she realized then. Communication was impossible. Then what was left? Try to take the wheel away from him? Even in her desperation she realized the futility of that. And if she provoked him to violence again, this time he might kill her or throw her overboard. It wasn’t fear of being hurt or even killed that made her rule that out, or reserve it as a final gamble when everything else had failed, but merely the simple, monolithic fact that her staying on here and staying alive represented the only chance they had. She had to try every other possibility first. But what? Then the answer occurred to her: she couldn’t make him turn back, but at least she could stop his going any farther. It was still dead calm, and there was a good chance it would remain that way for hours, or even the rest of the day; if she could disable the engine, John might be able to reach them in the dinghy. But access to it was below; she had to get down into the cabin. Would he let her?