“He was actually doing pretty good,” Howard told Wilson. “He was making mistakes, but he was willing.”
Brace had hovered close beside Howard, standing at Adrian’s rail as they watched the boat which rocked, plunged, took spray and seemed for a moment to join with the yellow raft. Across a hundred yards of tossing water, Dane’s voice was thin with propelling curses, as if only a voice of arrogance and scorn could answer the indifference of the heat-draining sea. Adrian came ahead slowly. Levere settled on the right measure of revolutions per minute. Adrian met the swell, treading like a dancer moving from quick, dramatic action into a slow coda. The small-boat’s crew shipped oars. The sky was a gray, luminous frame suggesting that the sun had not yet abandoned the planet. Cold wind moved from the mouth of the luminosity like a dissenting opinion from a court of natural law.
“That’s when we got that guy aboard,” Howard told Wilson. “The old man wanted Snow fetched to the messdeck. He sent the kid.”
Brace seemed to have a nesting instinct for the engine room. He had moved like a homing pigeon flying in heavy wind. Adrian was by then cross seas, wallowing, brought about by Chappel to make a lee. Men advanced about the decks in short rushes, were brought up against bulkheads or rails with jarring shocks. In the galley, a mug or bowl spun from the rubber fingers of a rack that was guaranteed to prevent all minor disasters. The crash was like the report of a small rifle echoing through open hatches and accompanied by the shout of Lamp’s despair. Brace climbed the deck, clambered, advanced in small dashes, arrived at the engine room ladder. He descended and spoke to his hero, Snow.
“Take the board,” Snow said to the elflike Masters. He turned back to Brace. “Back him up on the plates until I send relief.” Snow disappeared up the ladder, and Brace, asked for the first time to be competent in a situation that was not a drill, stood watchful and prepared beside the port engine. He dangled a wiping rag from one hand and watched the brilliantly lighted engine room rise, dash sideways, fall, as Adrian slipped into the trough and seemed trying to shake the heavy engines loose from mountings or drive them through the hull. Lights flickered, flared in brilliant surges as the generator faltered and then took hold.
Brace had little training, but, for the moment, he had enough. He listened for disturbance in the systems, studied what he knew of the fluid movement through piping. He was entranced, and might temporarily have forgotten his latest problem.
“Talked to Snow while they were on watch,” Howard told Wilson. “Maybe that’s why he blew up later.”
“No transfer, huh?”
“Not until he hacks the deck. Not until Dane calls him a seaman.”
“I understand your boy. Hate my own rate. I rather almost be a cook, even.”
“You aren’t nosy enough. Not even for a yeoman. But I know what you mean.”
“He can make seaman in another six months.”
“If the offer still stands,” Howard said uncomfortably. “It was made before the steward went crazy.”
Amon, his seasickness overcome, had trotted forward like a short shadow to the bridge with a half-filled pitcher of fresh coffee. He staggered and pinged and ponged in the passageway as Adrian rolled. The stretcher crew came through the hatchway, maneuvering the rescued flyer, and Amon gave way and stepped onto the fiddley. He began to cross the fiddley on a journey he had made a thousand unremarkable times. He glanced down into the flaring and flickering lights, was held fixed by the ghastly sight of Jensen standing on the plates. Amon opened his mouth to scream, found himself without breath or voice; or found himself under the slapping control of the satisfied and smiling Buddha. The stretcher party passed. Amon stood trembling. He conversed with his feet. He praised his feet. He lied to them with astounding deceptions in an effort to get them to walk. The hump-shouldered figure of Jensen stumbled against the roll of the ship. It righted itself like a clumsy doll. Amon stared. Stared. A wiping rag dangled from Jensen’s hand, as it had always dangled from Jensen’s hand when Amon had made trips across this fiddley. Jensen was sanely in control in this sea world, and because of that, Amon’s world changed into a surreal and desperate place. The ship skidded, fell away, banged into the trough and the lights flickered, died, returned and then died again as the generator kicked off the line. Yells from below rose, jumped, swarmed in the darkness. Amon, deranged, heard Jensen’s voice. In the distance, but rapidly approaching, moved the voice of Wysczknowski cursing loudly at the sea.
Amon’s deceived feet began to slowly move him backward. He stepped from the fiddley into the after passage, turned, and slowly walked through a hatchway to the main deck. Adrian rolled, slammed, plummeted. Amon dumped the coffee into the scuppers. Then, softly treading the banging ladder, he took the pitcher to the galley, groping, and secured it with great care. Wordless, Amon walked to the wardroom past the grunting urgency of men who stripped the flyer and assisted Snow. Amon knelt on all fours and crawled beneath the wardroom table. When Lamp, abustle in official alarm, found him there an hour later, Amon was mute. He tried to speak. Produced a whimper.
Watches changed. On the flying bridge, Conally and Glass stood searching their sectors like men digging for one bright coin in that huge pocket of sea. They were remote, isolated, unreported. In Boston, Natchez, London, Madrid, Hong Kong, there occurred murders. Along the Yangtze there were murders, and in Moscow and in Lima, Peru. Somewhere in the east, murder occurred along a vaguely theoretical line termed MLR by Marines. Murder was like a wilted flower in Chicago and Rome. There was murder in L.A. and in Anchorage, in Frisco, Mexico City and Tampa. Conally and Glass searched, kept tight lips closed over teeth that, exposed, would ache in the wind. Glass sighted the second yellow raft. Conally saw that it was upside down.
“Still crazy?”
“He came out of it in three or four hours,” Howard told Wilson, “then he went back in.”
Murder ran red and surging in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, and it pulsed redly in Cape Town. Murder attended a fish war in Bristol Bay. Murder colored a street in Melbourne, popped like a small and hotly glowing flare in Sydney, in Paris, and Krakow.
“It got toward sunset,” Howard told Wilson. “Lamp kidded Amon along. Got him talking. We put the flyer in the wardroom, and Amon was kind of hiding on the messdeck.”
Brace, perhaps with curiosity over a rumored madman, or more likely in need of coffee after a turn on the flying bridge, descended to the messdeck. Adrian was corkscrewing on a downward leg that had the sea on its quarter. Brace carried a wet foul weather jacket poxed with small, triangular tears. He had somewhere borrowed a needle and thread. In the bright lights of the messdeck his face no longer seemed unremarkable. His high forehead rising toward his brief cap of fur was damp from spray, and from sweat caused by hood and watch cap. His forehead wrinkled. His mouth, formerly lax and unimportant, was clamped in a knowledgeable line. In spite of the odds, he looked like a man who knew what he was doing.
Mother Lamp hovered about Amon. He clucked, joked, looked like a man fighting a chill. The brightly lit messdeck was damp and disarranged. A sprinkle of wet salt lay like a small white trail blazed across a table. The flyer’s wet clothing hung drying in the galley, swinging with the plunge of the ship like a hanged man dancing. Lamp tsked. Amon murmured. Wysczknowski, his long Polack face, thin-nosed and blue-eyed beneath washed blond hair, slumped at the engineer’s table. He fumbled a deck of moist, nearly undealable cards like a man who has newly discovered that he detests solitaire.