Mal gave Dolan a quick look. In the glare of the floodlight the odd green eyes of the first officer were like the shadowy side of one of the big bergs from the Arctic ice pack. Standing next to him, Atkinson was once again startled at the size of the man. His breadth made him look stocky in spite of his better than six feet of height. The big hands, their backs covered with freckles and coarse red hair, were like one-gallon gourds.
“He’s worried about something?” Mal asked.
“The other passengers. They’ll make it all right. All their stuff’s aboard. I think that’s their car now. Yes. There they are.”
Mal stood beside Bob Dolan at the rail and looked down at the five people who clambered out of the touring-car taxi. They were foreshortened by the height, but he had no difficulty recognizing the three men and two women from the Great Eastern.
As the bald-headed man started to look up, Mal, with an instinctive reaction which surprised him, straightened up so that his face was not visible from below.
He heard the familiar babble of the plump black-haired girl, the quiet answer by one of the two husky young men. Dolan went to the head of the gangplank to welcome them aboard, and Mal walked out of the light down toward the fantail. Once in the deep shadows he leaned against the rail and watched the preparations for departure.
The pilot came aboard. Soon the lines were cast off. The soft guttural vibrations of the engines and drive shaft quickened as black water widened between the hull and the dock. The Bjornsan Star moved slowly out into the channel and headed down toward the sea. Sailors coiled and stacked the mooring lines and the floodlight clicked off so that the pilot could see the channel markers more clearly. The wind freshened on the side of Mal’s face as the teeming stench of Calcutta began to diminish astern of them.
Dolan was nowhere to be seen. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the faint glow of the stars, Mal picked his way toward the bow. Muddy water, frothed by the knifing of the bow, swept back along the hull. Forward, four large bulldozers, like big sleeping animals, were lashed to the deck, fore and aft of the forward hatch.
Once he reached the bow, he turned and looked up and back. He saw the compass light on the bridge shining faintly against the dark face of the native pilot, saw Paulus, frail beside Dolan. The bull-throated voice of the ship startled Mal with a long blast. Flames flickered from the low decks of the native craft moored to the river banks and he heard a snatch of plaintive Hindu song.
Now the voyage had started and he thought that in many ways a voyage, for a passenger, is like a serious illness. It is a freedom from all responsibility, and after a time, if the voyage lasts long enough, it is easy to forget all that went before it, easy to forget that it will ever end.
He leaned his back against the rail and hooked his elbows over it. The breeze had begun to dry his damp clothes. Then he saw a vague lightness moving toward him, moving carefully along the narrow spaces of the open deck. He could not make it out for a time and watched carefully until she was silhouetted against a patch of the lights on shore. He then saw that it was a tall woman, and he guessed that it was the one from the hotel.
When she was but five feet away he said, “Good evening.”
She gave a small startled cry and put her hand to her throat. She was close enough so that he could see that it was the girl from the hotel.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She laughed nervously. “I just didn’t know anyone was up here. I wanted to cool off after that ghastly heat in the city. Are you one of the officers?”
“No. I’m a passenger, too. Malcolm Atkinson.”
She moved closer and leaned over the rail beside him. He turned so that they stood there, elbow to elbow.
“My name is Temble. Mrs. Roger Temble, Mr. Atkinson.”
“How do you do,” he said gravely. She put her hand for a moment in his. Her fingers were long and cool.
“Are you going to Australia?” she said.
“No. All the way to California.”
“Why, so are we! We had to take a little ship like this one because of all our equipment, you know.”
“Equipment?”
“I guess there’s no reason why you would know. My husband’s work is only well-known among his fellow scientists. He's a geologist and paleontologist. We’ve been on a small expedition to the Northwest frontier. It's never been adequately covered before, you know. It’s lasted seventeen months now.” She had begun to talk rapidly with an odd nervousness that made him uncomfortable. “Dr. Temble didn’t want me to come with him because of the unsettled conditions here in the East. He was just going to bring Dave Welling and Tom Branch with him this time, but I guess I made a nuisance of myself. The way wives will. So the doctor said I could come and bring along a girl friend. I asked Gina Farrow, and... would you have a light, please?”
Mal turned his back to the wind and cupped his hand around the flame of his lighter. She leaned forward, the cigarette trembling though she held it with both her lips and her fingers. As she did so she looked up into his face.
Her eyes widened with what he could only call terror and recognition. She turned and fled along the dark deck. He heard her bump painfully into a stanchion and go on without a sound. He was too surprised to call after her. He saw the glow of her cigarette on the deck at his feet. He picked it up and flipped it overboard.
Much later he went down to his cabin, adjusted the ventilator so that the breeze was directed into his bunk and went to sleep, still wondering about the odd behavior of Mrs. Temble. But sleep took him out of here and now — back into there and then — back into fear that awoke him, time and time again, with the taste of it on his lips.
II
It was eight when he went topside. The Bjornsan Star was still heading down the river toward the sea, but the banks had faded away until they were but misty lines on the horizon. He found Dolan amidships. The Irishman’s eyes were red-rimmed, but he had a heartiness about him.
“Mal, lad, did we wake you thumping the craft on the bottom?”
“How do you mean?”
“ ’Tis the only way you can get down this censored son of a river. At low tide we rested her on the bottom for nearly an hour.”
“I didn’t even notice. How many passengers are there?”
“Yourself, a party of five — explorers or something — and a dusky gentleman from Kashmir. Seven passengers all told. Have you breakfasted. No? Come along, I’ll guide you to the food department.”
After devious below-decks turnings, Dolan stepped aside and ushered Mal on with a bow. He stepped over the weather sill into a room roughly twenty by ten. A table that would set eight was bolted in the center of the room. Four tables which would seat two were bolted in the corners. There was a smell of strong coffee in the air. At the far end of the room a door swung back and forth with the gentle pitch of the ship in the mild river swells.
Captain Paulus and a stranger, a young man about twenty-one, his face strong and oddly vacant, sat at the far left corner. Paulus nodded distantly at Mal and leaned over his plate again. At the large central table for eight sat one of the two young men of the expedition and the dark-haired plump girl — Gina Farrow.
Mal smiled at the captain, turned right and took the first table directly to the right of the door from the passageway. As he sat down he could feel the eyes of the two at the big table on him. A few moments later a husky young blond lad, not more than seventeen years old, came out of the galley and came directly to him.
“Vee haff,” he said, “broon juice from tins, bread toasted, aiks how you vish those, blanty coffee, sar.”