* * *
The captain was on the wing of the bridge along with the first and second mates when Karen Brooke heard the telephone ring in the wheelhouse. The three of them went inside, and in a minute she heard the engine room telegraph. The deck trembled under her feet, and there was a noisy shuddering of the whole midships structure as the ship began to move slowly ahead. Then, strangely, above this sound, she thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upwards from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran towards the bridge The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.
‘A man!’ she cried out, pointing. ‘There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.’
He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. ‘Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!’ But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.
‘Captain! Stop! Back up!’ She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?
‘What is it, Mrs. Brooke?’ he asked.
‘She says she saw a man on a raft,’ the second mate said.
She saw the exchanged glance. Passengers! The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. ‘Back there!’ she cried out again, gesturing. ‘He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!’
The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, ‘It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.’
‘Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?’
‘Not on our radar.’ It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. ‘Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.’ Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He ripped the canister loose from its supports and threw the whole thing over the side. Karen heard it splash in the water below them, and in a moment a torchlike flame appeared, lighting up the surface of the sea as it began to drop astern. The chief mate turned and called out to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse. ‘Hard left!’
‘Mr. Lind!’ the captain said angrily, drowning out the helmsman’s reply. It was obvious even to Karen that Lind had vastly exceeded his authority, since it wasn’t his watch and the captain was on the bridge besides, but the big man was completely at ease.
He winked at Karen. ‘Cap, it’ll cost us ten minutes to find out. If there’s nobody there, I’ll buy the company a new life ring, and Mrs. Brooke will give a cocktail party.’
The ship was already beginning to swing. The captain started to countermand the order, then shrugged and remained silent. Karen sighed with relief as she retreated from the bridge where she had no business. Lind, she thought, was something of a man.
And with a mocking and reckless sense of humor that could have wrecked it, she added to herself, thinking of the ‘cocktail party’. Captain Steen was a Baptist, a teetotaler, and a dedicated crusader against alcohol. She crossed to the port side of the boat deck where she could continue to watch the flare after they completed the turn, trying to sort out her reactions to the odd fact that she had probably saved a man’s life. What was that old Chinese belief? That if you saved somebody’s life you had meddled in his destiny and you were responsible for him from then on?
* * *
Goddard saw the flame blossom on the surface of the sea, and collapsed, shaking all over and too weak to do anything for a moment. He saw the ship begin to swing in her hard-over turn, circling to come back through the area, and when he had his breath back he slipped over the side again and began to push the raft toward the circle of light, some two hundred yards away. By the time he came up to it the ship had already reached the limit of her opposite course and was turning toward him again. He stopped in the edge of the illuminated area with the raft between the flare and the oncoming ship so he would be silhouetted against it, and climbed back aboard. He waved, knowing they would have their glasses on the light and would have seen him by now. Lying on his back, he fought his way into the soggy dungarees. He sat up, drank the last of the water in the bottle, and waited.
The ship came on. While still a quarter mile away they backed down briefly on the engine to take most of the way off her there, before they came abreast, so the wash from the propeller wouldn’t sweep him away from her. The engine stopped, and she began to drift slowly down on him, coming to rest at last not more than fifty yards away. He saw men working on the boat deck, and one of the starboard boats started to swing out in its davits. They didn’t know what kind of shape he might be in, or whether there could be somebody else lying in the bottom of the raft.
He cupped his hands. ‘Don’t lower a boat! Just a ladder!’
A voice came back from the darkness of the bridge. ‘You sure? How about the accommodation ladder?’
That would be stowed, and it would take twenty minutes to break it out and rig it. ‘Just a pilot ladder,’ he shouted back. He took a quick look around to be sure there were no cruising dorsals attracted by the flare, slipped over the side, and began pushing the raft ahead of him. In a minute the beam of a flashlight probed downward from the after well-deck to give him a mark, and just before he reached the ship’s side there was the rattle and bumping of a pilot ladder being dropped over. The lower end of it was in the water under the beam of light. He pushed the raft aside and swam over to it. The end of a line dropped into the sea beside him.
‘Make it fast around yourself,’ a voice called down. They were determined to make a stretcher case out of him, he thought, but they might have a case, at that. He was pretty well used up. He treaded water while he passed the line around under his arms and made it fast. Grasping the chains at the ends of the ladder treads, he started up, while the men above took up the slack in his safety line. It was a long way up, and he found he was weaker than he’d thought. Hands grasped his arms and helped him over the bulwark and down on deck. He shook with fatigue while water dripped from his body, vaguely conscious of an excited buzzing of voices from a number of the crew gathered in the well-deck. One of the cargo lights was turned on. Somebody unbent the safety line while two men continued to support him, apparently trying to lead him over to a seat on a hatch cover. He shook his head.