“I don’t know why you don’t just puke.”
“Buddhists don’t,” Amon said, “or me, either. It’s no cinch to be Hawaiian.”
Howard trudged away from watch on the flying bridge. He descended a ladder to the main deck, entered through a hatch, crossed the fiddley in a mild stupor, glancing below for portents and finding none. Wysczknowski now sat at the board. Masters, a tall snipe who had a face that looked like an elf’s, stood gazing at machinery, bracing himself against a rail, muttering; in elvish, perhaps.
Howard crossed the fiddley, trudged to the messdeck. He drew watchstander coffee from a small pot as Amon prepared the large coffee urn. Howard stared at the steaming mug of coffee as if debating whether to drink the stuff or use it to warm his hands. He hesitated again, between the alternatives of sleep or a wait for boiled eggs and toast from Lamp’s sloshing, rattling machinery.
“Abner’s broken off the search,” he said. “Those guys have been down for twenty-two hours.”
“We’ve lost ’em.” Lamp’s voice was filled with honest misery.
“Secure it soon. Head back in.” Amon poured a brown stream of ground coffee, watched the roll of Adrian tip his hand to throw a dry sprinkle of brown across the messdeck. “I always spill. I tell myself I won’t. I tell myself, Amon, this time… but look at it, how clever.”
“You sound like Glass.”
“I know a great deal about life.”
“‘Tis bad luck, losing the first ones of the year.”
“I don’t think we’ll break off,” said Howard. “I think the old man will hang around until District sends us in.”
“To our misery.”
“You’re not in the water, sonny. Don’t talk about misery—”
“Hold up… we’re coming around.”
“A contact? Maybe a contact?”
Adrian heeled from a westward leg and drove southeast, slipping sideways in a quartering sea as it made a dash farther down the line of search. At full speed the ship bucked, kicked, lunged in heavy forefoot stomps to starboard, the mast like a great crucifix attempting to dip the waves as if to calm them.
“Cap knows we’ll get called in,” radioman James told a few men assembled on the messdeck. “He’s trying to steal a little sea room.”
“He’s tough. Ol’ cap is tough.” The mulatto McClean wore an ambitious black patch of grease on his dull-skinned cheek. “Lift eggs from under a settin’ hen.”
“Lift eggs right off your plate if this sea keeps up.”
Farther south, in the gleaming District offices, sleek and chubby yeomen, radiomen, and bored JOODs no doubt finished morning coffee, licked donut sugar from plump, shore-going fingers, and noticed that Adrian had not yet broken off. By the time the message to secure arrived, Levere had stolen sixteen miles. Adrian set a homeward course, zigzagging across a westward line and inshore from its former line of search. The morning routine set in as jolts and spray climbed high about the decks from the northeast leg while cold men dropped like slick, wet stones down the ladder to the messdeck. The men were vaguely angry with the sea.
“What good does this do?”
“Levere’s still giving it a shake.”
“He’s giving us a shake.”
Gunner Majors brushed spray from his eyebrows as he kept his glasses tipped away from wind that scoured the flying bridge. No gulls flew on such a day, no basking sharks lay aslumber on the sea, and while flotsam was likely within fifty miles of the coast, Majors would later say that he already knew he had a target. He lifted the glasses to confirm. Dropped them to hang from one hand. Took a deep breath and lifted them to reconfirm. He leaned forward to press a buzzer beside a voice tube.
On the westward, inshore leg, sea anchor unstreamed, like a yellow mite on the gray immensity of water, the raft appeared, disappeared, appeared, tossed sporadic and water-filled, unbailed, like the last beat of a dying heart.
“All hands. All hands.”
In the engine room, bells clanged and the pulse of engines broke free from its metronome throb. Forward in the crew’s compartment, sleeping men felt the thrust of the engines. They tossed in their sacks, fumbled with belts buckles looped from waists around the rails of bunks. They slid blinking onto the rising and unsteady deck, rebuckling belts with one hand, reaching for foul weather gear with the other while they braced against the thrust of Adrian by jamming butts between bunks or against angles formed by lockers. In the engine room, Snow appeared like a short puff of magic, while above his head on the grates of the fiddley, men’s feet hammered, staggered, bore pairs of hands toward the boat deck and the main deck. On the starboard wing a hatch erupted against the wind, as Dane, hollering with the certainty of an epistle, stubby as a boulder, yelled to the boat crew. Chappel relieved the helm and Adrian pressed in a sweep that would take it around the raft and place the bow into the sea. James wrote the log, danced thinly as he reached for radio message blanks and began to scrawl the contact report. Howard headed aft across the boat deck and down the ladder to the fantail to unlash steel basket stretchers. Above them all, Majors stood on the flying bridge, remote, his glasses sweeping the horizon, that vast orphanage.
Brace, the newest wanderer over water, stood beside Conally on the boat deck as Conally stripped the canvas cover off the boat. “Stand down to the main deck,” Conally told him. “Make way for the boat crew.”
“What’ll I do?”
“Stop being stupid. Man the rail to fend off.”
Dane, Conally, Glass, Joyce and Rodgers jumped, sat beside shipped oars, riding the boat in the wind of the deck like men preparing for a sail across the sky. Fallon, McClean and Racca tended lines, fended off, and the boat dropped in rapid jerks toward the sea, a controlled crash.
“Unhooked forward.”
“Unhooked aft.”
“Oars. Get ’em over. Dig.”
Howard staggered forward, packing a bulky stretcher, the straps free and dangling like a machine of the Inquisition prepared to clasp a victim. He bumped into Brace.
“What? What?”
“Stand by to take their lines. Unhook those chains. Let down fenders.”
McClean arrived. “Child,” he said to Brace, “do it this-a-way.” To Howard he said, “I got it.”
“Blankets,” said Howard vaguely, and dashed toward a hatch beyond which brooded the medical locker.
Dane stood at the sweep, grunted orders, swore thinmouthed and violent as the boat returned, sliding into the lee made when Levere turned the ship. Dane’s mouth hammered out shapes of words above his eyes which flashed with eternal-seeming pain; either the hot pain of rheumatism or the cold burn of the sea. In the boat a flyer bent forward, jammed between two oarsmen, leaning like a drunk or a propped dead man against the post of Conally’s back, while Conally dabbed at the sea with an oar, ineffective, off balance.
With the helm trusted to the hands of his first quartermaster, Levere appeared on the main deck as the boat came alongside.
“How is he, chief?”
“Near froze.”
“Can he talk?”
“He’s too froze.”
“The other one?”
“Not a chance.”
“Chief Snow to the messdeck,” Levere told Brace. “On the double, sailor.” Levere turned to Howard. “Assist Chief Snow. Get this man talking.”