“You’re working that old imagination overtime,” Gina said tightly.
“Am I, now? It seems that three days ago during our bridge game some inquisitive character, probably either Welling or Branch, neatly forced the door to my cabin and went through my stuff. In the bottom of my flight bag he found my credentials and a copy of one magazine carrying my picture along with the last article of the German series. So he tipped off the doctor that I was okay and the doctor has been beaming at me ever since.”
“Boy!” said Gina. “You’ve been taking it in the leg.”
“Gina, my lass, sometimes you bore me. And this is one of the times. You five people have your guard up so high that you’re all about to fall over backward. What is it, kids? Smuggling? Tell Uncle Mal.”
With an odd sound in her throat, Sara jumped up, picked up her blanket and walked quickly away. Mal laughed. “You see, Gina, you’ve got one weak sister in the group. The rest of you can play poker, but that’s not Sara’s game. She’s your giveaway.”
“Shut up!” Gina said.
“Why should I? It makes a long trip very interesting. The tough little doc and the frightened wife and the vivid widow and the two muscle boys. I guess one of the endemic diseases of the reporter class is an itching bump of curiosity and—”
She put her hand on his wrist and her fingers tightened down. Her dark eyes, looking into his, were hard and direct. “You talk a lot, Mal. That’s a disease, too. Now use your head. If this was a small matter, we could all carry it off so you’d never guess. But it’s big. It’s so big, Mal, and I want you to believe me because it may be pretty important to you — and you are a nice guy. It’s so big that it’s worth risking a shipboard... accident to protect it. Is that clear enough.”
“Am I to take it that you’ve just threatened me?”
“I thought it was pretty clear.”
“Come off it, Gina. That’s melodrammer. Is a threat supposed to scare me?”
He had turned onto his back. She was propped up on both elbows, her dark hair falling forward by her cheeks so that a long strand of it brushed his arm. She looked beyond him up the expanse of deck. Then, very deliberately, she lowered her head and covered his lips with hers. Her bared teeth were bruising. As he involuntarily grasped her upper arm, feeling the sun oil under his fingers, she pulled away.
“That,” she said, “is for being a guy who can’t be frightened.”
He saw that the sunglare had shrunk the pupils of her eyes to pinpoints. She was breathing shallowly. “Now I get the approach,” he said. “It comes in three levels. The first one is to scare me. I don’t scare. The second two levels are intermingled. An appeal to be rational about this, plus the promise of a bonus named Gina if I act like a good boy.”
She pushed herself back onto her haunches. Her face was suddenly ugly. She called him a name which he had never before heard a woman use. For a moment he thought she was going to leave. But she lay down again, on her back and shielded her eyes with her forearm.
“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Such language.”
Her voice was far away. “Have you ever tried to live on what our fine colleges pay an assistant professor? You wouldn’t understand that, would you? You wouldn’t understand watching the years go by. You wouldn’t know what it can do to a woman.”
She sat up again and leaned toward him. “Mal, I mean this. If anybody... anybody... tries to take away from me what I’m going to have, I’ll kill them. I’ll get something sharp and I’ll kill them with it. And if they- take it away from me, I’ll spend the rest of my life finding them and killing them for doing it to me, even if I have to do it on a busy street.”
Then she did get up, picked up the bottle of lotion, the towel and her blanket and left in the direction Sara had taken. He watched her leave. Her flanks moved solidly under the thin trunks. The black hair, spilled down to her shoulders, glinted blue in the sun.
The Bjornsan Star churned and waddled placidly down through the blue seas. Routines became more fixed. Mal knew from Temble’s unchanged attitude that neither of the girls had spoken to him about the conversation in the sun. Their motives in keeping silent were not clear to him. Routine brought with it an emotional and intellectual lethargy — precisely what he had sought for in taking passage on the ship. It was a time for healing. Later would come re-evaluation. He had been filled with a hundred springs wound tight. Each day more of them relaxed.
During the daily bridge sessions it became easier for him to forget that there was a mystery about the five which he had not unraveled. Then he would look over and see Gina’s dark eyes and he would remember again.
He sunbathed until it grew too cold. He played chess with MacLane, talked football with Torgeson, talked ships and the sea with Bob Dolan. Each night he fell immediately into dreamless sleep. Slowly he regained the weight he had lost, and he kept it from settling around his middle by a series of exercises in his cabin that took a half hour each morning and a half hour each night.
There were odd little incidents. One night he could not sleep. He went up onto the boat deck with such unconscious lack of noise that Temble and his wife did not hear him. Mal went to the far side of the boat deck. He could hear Temble’s hoarse angry tones, but he could not make out the words. Finally Temble passed him ten feet away, went down the ladderway to the main deck.
When Mal walked over to the other side he saw that Sara still stood there, looking out across the placid sea, clad in a pale robe. The hem whipped in the wind as did her hair, glowing faintly in the starlight.
She turned as she heard his steps. “Nice night,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He stood beside her. “Neither could I,” she said. The silence between them was not awkward.
“It seems too bad,” he said, “that trips must have an end.”
Her response startled him. She turned into his arms with a sob in her throat. She was trembling. He held her closely, her head against his shoulder. She cried with almost perfect silence. When the interval between the racking sobs grew longer, he put his knuckles under her chin and gently forced her to look up at him. He kissed her on the lips, meaning it for a gesture of kindliness, doing it without conscious thought. He heard her breath catch in her throat as her arms went strongly around his neck and she pressed herself closer to him, responding to the kiss with a silent ferocity that turned it into something not at all like the gesture he had planned.
Then he kissed her cheeks and tasted the salt of tears on his lips.
He tried to make a joke of it. “A fine thing,” he whispered. “This would look just fine to the honorable doctor.”
“If he thought anything about it, he would probably find it amusing,” she said.
“I don't think I understand.”
“Don't try to. There’s been nothing between Roger and me for... for a very long time, Mal.” She pushed away from him, almost roughly. “But that’s no reason for this. You caught me when I was feeling sorry for myself. Please, Mal. Let’s both forget it.”
“That might be a difficult thing to do, Sara.”
“Don’t try to be gallant, Mal. I’m not in the mood. Just forget it happened. That ought to be simple enough, hadn’t it?”
“If you say so, Sara. Good night.”
“Good night and... thank you very much, Mal.”
That was one incident. It did not quite end there. The next afternoon Gina came to him where he stood alone on deck and said, with waspish humor, “Let’s both try to forget, darling.”
“Couldn't you sleep?”
“Not with you comforting our solemn girl about six feet from the porthole over my bed, I couldn’t. It was a sweet scene, dear. You played it well. But don’t try to follow it up.”