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 plane 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.