The sun rose. The glare began, eye-searing and brutal, broken only intermittently by the tilting planes of the swell. His skin itched and chafed inside his salt-saturated clothing, and as his face and arms began to dry they felt as though they were encased in a crust that would shatter when he moved. The only relief, which was temporary and merely an illusion, was to plunge overboard and wash it away with water that would leave its own accumulation. The swell was smaller now than it had been last night, and if it died out completely the sea would become the polished metal sheet of a reflector oven.
He searched the horizon again, and lay back, an arm across his closed eyes to shield them from the glare. He thought of mountain streams he had fished where the water was cold enough to make his teeth hurt when he drank it, and after a while he found himself remembering beer—beer in foaming steins and cold bottles beaded with moisture. Tüborg and Dos Equis and Budweiser and Lowenbrau, the gaseous and ecstatic sighs of punched cans, beer in waterfront dives and yacht club bars, in sidewalk cafes in Paris and the parlors of Texas whorehouses and the cockpits of sports fishermen off Cape San Lucas and Bimini.
There was the place in Tampico a long time ago, so cool and dim after the incandescent whiteness of the street, where draft beer was served in frosted earthen steins and there were saucers of olives on the polished mahogany bar with sliced limes to squeeze over them. That was on the other Shoshone, the first one, when he’d run away from home and shipped as ordinary seaman, and afterward he’d gone out to La Union, where the girls sat beside the doorways of their cribs, and he’d got into a fight with the second mate of a Sinclair tanker over something he couldn’t even remember now, and the second mate had beaten hell out of him. He was only nineteen then and still filling out, but too cocky, and he probably deserved to have his ass kicked.
It was a long way from the fo’c’sle of an old Hog Islander to skippering your own Cal 40 in the Acapulco race, but it had been a long time, too, and where did it go, that feeling of being nineteen, or twenty-three, or even thirty-six? You not only didn’t know what had become of it, you weren’t even sure what it was any more and couldn’t remember what it had been when you’d had it. Juice? Drive? Confidence? No, it wasn’t as simple as that; as close as you could come to it was caring. Stoically accepting the fact that within a few days he was going to die was no longer courage; it was merely apathy. The only real regret was that he’d suckered himself into such a hell of a sad way of doing it. He smiled now at the transparency of christening the sloop Shoshone. Did he think the nineteen-year-old Harry Goddard was still out here somewhere, to be searched for and reclaimed?
The sun reached the meridian. Reflected from the oily surface of the sea, it burned its way even through closed eyelids and felt like flame against his skin. Real thirst began, a foretaste of the agony to come, and he took a swallow of the water, rolling it around his mouth for long seconds before he let it trickle down his throat. A shark appeared from somewhere and circled the raft three or four times as though intrigued by the strange yellow bubble. Goddard watched its dorsal slicing the surface and, more to break the eerie silence than anything else, said to it, ‘Shove off, you silly bastard. That’s a low-budget routine.’ The shark came closer on its next pass, and he took out his knife and opened it, ready to stab if it decided to roll up and take an experimental bite out of the fabric. The shark lost interest and went away. Around two p.m. a light breeze sprang up, riffling and darkening the surface of the sea and lessening the intensity of its glare. It continued until late afternoon, making the heat at least endurable, and died out only with the vast chromatic explosion of sunset. He watched the colors fade in the sudden velvet night of the tropics and wondered how many more he would see. Two? Four? After a while he slept.
When he awoke, shivering again, he saw from the positions of the constellations overhead that it was after midnight. The sea was still slick and almost flat now, and beyond his feet propped on the rim of the raft a shimmering path of light stretched away toward a waning moon hung low in the eastern sky. He sat up to stretch his cramped muscles, and when he turned he saw the ship, not more than a mile away.
His first thought was that he must be dreaming. He rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the beard stab his salt-ravaged face, and looked again. It was real. But there was something wrong. When he realized what it was he had to choke down the cry pushing up into his throat. He could see only a stern light. It was going away from him. It had already passed, only minutes ago, while he slept.
No! How could it? He looked around at the placid unruffled sea. It would have passed within a few hundred yards, and the bow wave would have tossed the raft end over end like a bit of flotsam. There wasn’t even a trace of wake anywhere. He was almost directly astern of the ship, but it hadn’t gone by him. The only answer was that it was lying dead in the water. It had stopped for something, and had swung around as it lost steerage-way. Unless, he thought, his mind was already playing him tricks and there wasn’t any ship there at all.
2
Madeleine Darrington Lennox was lying naked on her bunk in the sweltering darkness of Cabin C when she heard the engine stop and wondered what was wrong with the stupid ship now. She didn’t care particularly except to the extent the stoppage might affect the rendezvous whose anticipation had made it almost impossible for her to lie still since she had switched out the light a half hour ago and begun her nightly wait for Barset to slip down the passageway and into the cabin. It had been her experience that when anything happened to break the routine of a ship, even on the midnight-to-four watch, there were apt to be people abroad in the passageways either seeking information or trying to right the matter, whatever it was, and Barset was too shrewd to run the risk of being seen by one of the deck officers or perhaps the captain himself. Laying the passengers was no part of the steward’s duties, no matter how great his virtuosity in this field, and as he put it with his gift for unprintable vulgarity, Holy Joe would defecate a ring around himself. So he might not come. And if he didn’t, in the state she was in now she’d need three of the capsules to get to sleep.
There was no air-conditioning, and the cabin would have been stifling in any event here in the tropics, but it was made worse by the fact she had closed the porthole, as she always did in anticipation of these delights, because it opened onto a deck outside, with no privacy at all if anybody happened to be out there. The door was closed all the way, too, instead of being on the hook, because he could open it and slip in a fraction of a second faster that way rather than having to fumble with the hook. The electric fan mounted on the bulkhead beyond the foot of her bunk was an oscillating type, sweeping an intermittent flow of air across her perspiring body, but there was nothing cooling about it; it was merely in motion. She didn’t mind the heat a great deal, however; it merely excited her, as did the vibration of a ship. Face it, she thought, what doesn’t?