These were the thoughts that occupied his mind as his body fought its way down the deck. Perforce they occupied only part of it. The rest of his consciousness was trying to deal with the physical sensations of the storm. The effect of it was intensified by the darkness. There was no sense of scale, as there had been off Durban. There was simply an unremitting personal attack, as though the wind hated him and was trying to wrestle him to the deck where the rain and spray could drown him. It had fingers that grasped any loose piece of clothing. It had arms that wrapped around him, trying to lift him and throw him. It had legs that thrust against his legs, trying to trip him — and all too often succeeding. It had fists that pummeled his face armed with knuckledusters of hail, until he couldn’t feel his cheekbones and his slitted eyes seemed as bruised and swollen as his nose. He fought it as it fought him, unrelentingly. And so he proceeded down the deck.
His preoccupation nearly tricked him. The howl of the wind from the south broke and sobbed. He charged forward without thinking. As soon as he was in the open another squall — a rogue, from the east — hit his shoulder like a heavy tackle and sent him sliding, sprawling across the deck.
The steel beneath his face was slick with inches of running water, the surface of it varnish-bright, like something preserved under glass. But as he slid over a section of it, the smooth water began to behave strangely, forming ripples, like a miniature mill race, for no apparent reason. Ben was too stunned to notice. He pulled himself erect and staggered on down the deck. The glassy water behind his boot heels rippled again along a line running from port to starboard right across the ship. Then the ripple was lost as the south wind returned with the rain.
It was the first sign that Prometheus was beginning to come apart.
Robin reached the Cargo Control Room door at a dead run, choking as her gasps for breath let some of the dissipating fumes into her lungs. She hung in the doorway as though crucified, watching her father turn from the empty, roaring windowframe.
“There’s someone out there!” he yelled.
She nodded, her mind running at frantic speed. Unlike her father she saw all too clearly the meaning of the smoke. The only reason for the wires to short out was if the computer was filling them with electrical impulses, trying to give orders to the pumps.
She endeavored, with every nerve in her body from the soles of her feet to her blood-thundering ears, to sense whether the pumps were obeying. It was hopeless. She could sense nothing beyond the storm.
At once she was in action again. She crossed to the VDU and snapped it on. It lit up. That was very bad.
She tapped in the lading schedules. Worse and worse. Her father was at her shoulder, his face as pale and pinched as her own. The four blue eyes scanned schedule after schedule. Under each neat, safe plan for the disposition of the cargo flashed one red word:
OVERRIDE
They read that same word ten times.
“What next?” she asked herself rather than him, concentrating so fiercely that she had all but forgotten his presence.
“Keep going.”
She had no alternative. She knew the machine only had ten preset lading schedules, but she pressed eleven anyway.
And up it came, good as gold. She went cold at the sight. The diagram of their ship with that sinister red box midships: the tank all the cargo should have been destined for.
And under it, the blessed words:
POWER FAILURE: UNABLE TO EXPEDITE.
They were hugging each other, still laughing with relief, when Martyr appeared in the doorway.
“He’s gone out onto the deck,” the American yelled.
Robin turned toward the chief and saw the desperation in his eyes. Crisply, she answered, “Then let’s get him.”
And for the first time in their brief acquaintance, she saw C. J. Martyr smile.
The storm took hold of them just as it had taken hold of Ben. It buffeted them together, however, and they gave each other strength. Four legs moved faster than two under these circumstances, and they fell over less often. Like Ben they avoided the catwalk: to catch him they would have to follow in his footsteps. At this intensity, the storm would hide anything but the most massive deck feature from forty feet up: the first mate would be able to move easily unobserved unless they were much closer than that. It would take luck even to find him. But one positive factor was obvious to both of them: he was heading toward the forecastle head.
That being said, locating him on Prometheus’s vast deck on a night like to night was likely to be a lengthy, dangerous process, if it could be done at all. But Ben clearly had a plan or he would not be out here now. If…
If…thought Robin. She could hardly believe that it was Ben. Less than twenty minutes ago she had been thinking of the first officer as fundamentally harmless. Now here she was, bound by the massive power of the wind to the one man she had suspected most of all, looking for this “harmless” man, trying to prove his guilt.
The night closed its fist around them, crushing them together. It was as though the wind had ceased its movement but attained solidity, muffling them. The rest of the storm seemed to recede. Even the ship became distant. All that really existed was the huge, water-filled, choking power all around them. It carried them forward for ten feet before it released them, dazed and disoriented, onto the forward section of the deck.
So they, like Ben scant yards before them, failed to notice the widening cracks in the deck.
Richard could feel it, though. Nothing definite. Nothing he could put his finger on. Nothing even in his conscious mind, yet. He felt the movement of his ship beginning to change beneath his wide-spaced feet and he reacted to it viscerally.
He stood by the helmsman, hands clenched behind his back, glaring out through the semiopaque glass that was all the storm left to him. John stood at the Collision Alarm Radar. There were watches out on the bridge wings and forecastle head armed with night glasses and hand-held radios. He was seriously thinking of sending someone else to the forecastle head. But he was two officers short, and there was something he couldn’t quite pin down making him grind his teeth together hard enough to cramp the muscles in his jaw.
Robin saw him first, crouching on the edge of a shadow — head, arms, and legs in darkness; shoulders and back bright — on the port side, just short of the forecastle head. Speech was impossible so she beat upon Martyr’s arm and pointed. He followed her gaze and broke into a shambling run. She went with him.
There were no niceties. None of the expertise the chief had shown earlier, when fighting the captain. The big American simply threw himself upon the crouching Englishman. It was all the storm would allow. They rolled together, all arms and legs, upon the slick, slippery deck.
Robin was not one to stand around. She thought about warning the man on the forecastle head. Richard had set the extra watch as soon as they had left Lyme Bay, to keep lookout for Channel traffic as they were cutting across the busy sea lanes. It was Kerem Khalil and she was worried that he might be hurt should anything go wrong here. But that would mean leaving these two alone. And that was not why she had come. She threw herself forward and landed squarely on the wrestling men.