“Who are you talking to? What is it?” Masters shouldered his way past Lamp, stood looking at Howard, then turned to Lamp.
“He was talking to me,” Howard said, “and this office is off limits to punks.”
Masters stood in the darkened office, his guilt changing to desperate despair. “A quill driver,” he said, “and a fat cook. You lie like rugs.”
Lamp reached with one foot to kick away the curving brass hook that secured the door. He closed the door carefully, like a man determined not to break anything. He twisted the worn, black light-switch and the office was illuminated. Howard backed toward the wardroom, dropped the mug, heard it smash. Howard was not a little frightened. Howard, and possibly no other man, had ever seen Lamp behave as Lamp behaved. Masters was not less than six feet, weighed not less than one-hundred-seventy, and yet, when Lamp leaned forward to snatch him by the belt and raise him into a corner of the office, Masters seemed like a small rag doll.
“You yellowed on the boat deck,” Lamp told him. “You’re tryin’ to start something.” He gave Masters a shake, and Masters’s head bonged against the angle formed by bulkhead and overhead. “Ain’t you? Ain’t you?”
Masters gasped, tried to arch backward, either to kick, or to relieve pressure from the belt that was cutting beneath his small ribs, chewing at his kidneys.
“Because if you can start something,” Lamp said, and he rattled Masters against the bulkhead, “if you can get everybody scared, then the boys will forget you’re yellow.”
“He’s about to get hurt bad,” Howard said timidly. “It’s breaking his back.”
Lamp’s forearm trembled. His voice lowered. He gave Masters a shake that rattled Masters’s head into the corner with a beat as steady as a fighter on a bag.
“I don’t book guys,” Lamp told Masters. “And I don’t threaten them. This here’s a promise.”
Masters choked, looked like he was dying.
“One word. One. There ain’t a place far enough, or a hole deep enough, that I can’t find you. Got that? Have you got that?”
Masters choked and gulped, tried to nod his banging head.
“Okay. Out.” Lamp dropped Masters, and Masters thumped gasping into the corner.
“And take the word to Racca,” Lamp told him. “Does he want something busted besides his arm?”
Lamp shrugged, turned toward Howard in a nearly placid manner. He was like a man easy in his mind after making a small and successful decision. “I got this bad temper,” he said apologetically. “Had to fight it pretty much all my life.”
Howard, who was mildly democratic, and who would have sworn that he could deal with reality, felt that the world which he thought he understood had just turned fish-belly up. “I better pick up these pieces,” he said apologetically. He began to kneel to get the broken mug.
Adrian skidded, kept skidding, kept skidding, to end with a thump that bent hinged knees and threw Lamp and Howard into squats. Masters, feeling his way to his feet, was knocked backward. He fell. Masters banged an already well-banged head.
“Where did that come from?”
“Count seven.”
Adrian ran another swell, banged hard, but it did not run the long line of travel that accompanied the first swell.
“That’s one.”
On the seventh swell, Adrian skidded, skidded, kept skidding, skidding, and the jolt rattled tables that were welded to the deck in wardroom and messdeck.
“It’s a new storm,” Lamp said. “Or the other one moved in a circle.”
“No wind.”
“It’s out there someplace.”
“If it’s circling.”
“It may find us. Maybe not.”
Masters managed to stand. He did not exactly look chastened, but he looked like a man with a brand new way of viewing matters. “We got guys aboard that scow.” He propped himself against a bulkhead, flapped one hand, helpless, turned to the hatch. He fled with all the dignity he could muster, about the same dignity owned by a mired donkey.
“At least you stopped him talking.”
“Naw,” Lamp said. “He’ll talk. He just won’t talk as loud.”
“What do you make…?” Howard pointed to the darkened wardroom.
“It’s a sign,” Lamp said easily. “What we got to do is figure out the sign.”
Howard had lost count. He thought the next wave might be the seventh. He steadied himself. “You weren’t afraid.” The wave was the seventh. Adrian roller-coastered, thumped, crashed.
“Nothing to be scared about,” Lamp said. “Jensen was a shipmate.” Lamp prepared to leave. “I got to figure some way to get these guys some coffee. I got to get something in some bellies.” He was suddenly a man ridden by anxiety, like a high school boy dared by his pals into a date with an older and experienced woman. He seemed ready to bustle, to explain legends, to become, in fact, the Lamp whom Howard had known for so long.
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Does Levere?”
Howard was about to say that it was not the same. “I guess I ought to check Racca,” he said. “Then go to the bridge. We’re in for it.”
Lamp flapped one hand, helplessly. “I’ve lost friends,” he said. “I’m awful sorry about your friend Wilson.” Then he fled, a man chased by abstract demons of memory which now wore the mild and practical names of hot cereal and fresh coffee.
In the hours before dawn the temperature plummeted; Howard, headed forward, stepped to the main deck to lean against a chain with both hands. The cold steel, the freezing air, and wisps of spray thrown from forward by the bow helped wake him. He stared into the dark sea that ran alongside, and he stood spraddle-legged against the increasing pitch. Phosphorescence spun past the hull in thin flashes like schools of fish. He tested for wind, found none except the small breeze raised by Adrian’s passage. In the scuppers, water ran from the breaking bow wave, and, along the edges of the scuppers, mushy salty-water ice formed a thin line, a promise, a threat; the line like a pencil of definition running the circumference of the ship.
Forward and to starboard, no more than a half mile distant, Aphrodite glowed against the dark sky and darker sea. Men were clustered forward. In the bright floodlights powered by a portable generator, the men moved like a congregation of shadows, as water washed across the sagging bow. They were like creatures of surf, primal; forms rising from the immense tide pool of the sea. Alongside Aphrodite the small boat bounced, was fended off by three, or possibly four, dark figures. The small boat moved alongside Aphrodite’s hull, and the figures bent over a bulky lump from which lines radiated to the deck.
Dane was attempting to rig a sea patch. Dane was not fooling around by casting the thing on the breath of a little hope, a little prayer. As Howard watched, Aphrodite turned its stern two points across the sea to press rushing water against the hull. The patch went over, the lines straightened, and the boat closed against the pitching yacht. For minutes Howard stood, leaning against the chain, mute. Then, from a distance, he heard shouting. He pushed himself erect, ready for action, a jolt of fear urging his feet toward the bridge. Then he stopped. The shouts were cheers. The wide mouth of the leak had sucked the patch.
“We’ve got it,” Howard said. “They did it, chum. They did it, Wilson.” He hesitated, looking up and down the deck as if he expected a reply. The only sounds were the sea, the distant hum of the generator, and the faint and distant voice of Dane hollering commands.
Chapter 19
“We thought we’d lost that kid, boys. We were sure of it.” Or so, in later years when cooking at the Base, Lamp would aver. By then, Lamp’s huge arms were thinner. Sagging laps of flesh hung from his upper arms in that way of formerly robust women who have spent their lives among small cares, small hopes and large ambitions for others—and, of course, in company with brushes and laundry.