‘I’m all right,’ he gasped.
The blond giant who had hold of his right arm let go, grinned at him, and said, ‘I guess you are, at that. And I thought I had a patient to practice on.’ He indicated the open first-aid kit on the hatch cover. Beside it was a pitcher of water. He poured a glass half full. ‘Easy does it’.
Goddard drank it and returned the glass. ‘I had a little on the raft.’
The only man present with an officer’s cap stepped forward. ‘I’m Captain Steen. Are there any others?’
‘No, just me.’ Goddard grinned painfully, his sun-and-salt-ravaged face feeling as though it would crack. ‘I’m glad to meet you, Captain.’ He held out his hand. ‘My name’s Goddard.’
They shook hands, Captain Steen somewhat stiffly, apparently a man with very little humor. Steen turned to one of the crew, and said, ‘Tell Mr. VanDoorn he can get under way.’
Goddard looked at the big man who had helped him aboard and given him the water. Though he was bare-headed and clad only in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with no insignia of any kind, he wore authority as casually as he did the bedroom slippers and the untamed shock of blond hair. ‘Mate?’ Goddard asked.
The other nodded. ‘Lind.’ They shook hands, and he asked, ‘Yacht, I suppose, with that Mickey Mouse life raft?’
‘Yeah,’ Goddard replied. ‘I was single-handing—’ He stopped, overcome with another attack of weakness and shaking, and began to sway. Lind and another man caught him before he could fall. They led him toward the ladder to the deck above.
Karen Brooke had been watching from the corner of the promenade deck as Goddard made his way up the pilot ladder, marveling that a castaway would have the strength to do it. Apparently he hadn’t been aboard the raft very long. Just as they helped him over the bulwark, Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway on the starboard side and joined her at the rail.
‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Mrs. Lennox asked. ‘A real rescue at sea. Who do you suppose he is?’
‘He must be off a small boat of some kind,’ Karen replied. ‘It was a tiny raft, one of the inflated kind, and I don’t think ships have them.’
‘A yachtsman! And look how tall he is.’ The older woman’s interest quickened. ‘Almost as big as Mr. Lind.’
Karen was amused, now that it appeared the man was neither ill nor dying of thirst and no longer an object of concern. He had cheated one species of man-eater, and now was being marked down by another. Mrs. Lennox had all the healthy interest in men of any normal, red-blooded, fifty-year-old widow, and she went to no great lengths to conceal it. She was still quite attractive, with a trim and sexy figure, smoky gray eyes, and a cascade of ash-blonde hair. She was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a nylon robe, but the hair was neatly combed and she had put on makeup.
Karen gazed musingly down into the well-deck where the man, surrounded by curious crew members, shook hands with the captain and then with Mr. Lind, and wondered if, in accordance with the old Chinese belief, she should try to summon up some feeling of responsibility for him. He really didn’t appear to need it. Even exhausted, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with water draining off him and his face covered with a week’s stubble of beard, he was an imposing figure and stamped with the competent look of a man who could take care of himself.
‘Good show, Mrs. Brooke.’ The two women turned. It was Mr. Egerton, coming down the ladder from the deck above to join them.
He was the passenger in Cabin G, a lean, erect man in his sixties with a gray moustache and gray hair, against which the black eye patch was undoubtedly dramatic but, to Karen, somehow vaguely theatrical, as though he had set out to contrive the effect. This was unfair, of course, and she realized that part of it was the clipped British accent, the occasional use of military terms, and expressions like that same ‘good show’. If you were a retired English army officer who had lost an eye somewhere, you could hardly be blamed if this were exactly the way a not very imaginative actor would play the part. He kept to his cabin a good deal of the time and seldom came to breakfast or lunch, so she didn’t know him very well, but he had beautiful manners and was an urbane and interesting dinner companion.
‘The second officer informs me you were the heroine of the affair,’ he went on. ‘Bit of good fortune for the chap that you were up and about, what?’
Karen caught the swift glance from Madeleine Lennox. The older woman recovered instantly, however, and exclaimed, ‘Darling, you mean you were the one who saw him? And you didn’t tell me?’
‘It was just an accident,’ Karen replied. ‘I woke up when the engine stopped and went up on the boat deck to look at the stars.’ Does that do it, dear? She went on to tell how she sighted the raft at the moment it was in the path of moonlight. Down in the well-deck, Mr. Lind and a seaman were helping the man toward the ladder. ‘I wish somebody would come up and tell us something.’
There was a shuddering vibration of the deck then as the Leander’s engine went full ahead. She began to move. Karen glanced off to starboard where the flare was still burning in the darkness, starting to drift slowly astern now as they went off and left it in the vastness of the Pacific. She shivered, thinking of being out there alone on a raft and seeing the ship moving away.
Just as she started to turn back, she became aware of the figure standing at the corner of the deckhouse. It was Mr.—what was his name—Krasuscki? No, Krasicki, she corrected herself. He was the passenger in Cabin H, but she had seen him only two or three times because of the illness that had kept him confined nearly ever since their departure from Callao. He was wearing pajamas and a heavy flannel robe, and he did look ill, she thought, with the hollow, almost cadaverous face and the feverish brightness of the eyes. She started to speak to him, but paused struck by the strangeness of his behavior. Stock still except for a nervous twitching at the corner of his mouth, he was staring past her at Walter Egerton.
Egerton turned then, and saw him. Krasicki continued to stare into his face with the same unwavering intensity for another two or three seconds, then wheeled and went back around the corner.
Egerton glanced at Karen, apparently puzzled. ‘I say, that must be our fellow-passenger. Does seem a spot feverish, doesn’t he?’
She nodded. It was odd, but entirely possible under the circumstances; they had been aboard the ship for six days now, but this was the first time they had seen each other. But why had Krasicki stared that way? It wasn’t simply ill-mannered, she thought; there’d been a trace of madness in it, or the horror of a man seeing a ghost.
3
It was called the hospital but it was only a spare room on the lower deck that had originally housed the gun crew when the Leander was built and put into service toward the end of World War II. It contained four bunks, a washbasin, some metal lockers, and a small desk. Naked and still dripping, Goddard was seated on one of the lower bunks toweling himself after the ecstasy of a freshwater shower, knowing that any minute now the reaction would hit him and he’d collapse like a dropped soufflé. Lind had just come back from somewhere, and the passageway outside was still jammed with crew members peering in.
Word had already spread that he’d been sailing a small boat single-handed across the Pacific, and as they grinned and voiced their congratulations and the cheerful but inevitable opinion of working seamen that anybody who’d sail anything across the ———ing ocean just for the fun of it ought to have his ———ing head examined, they tossed in on the other lower bunk a barrage of spare gear including several pairs of shorts, some slides, a new toothbrush in a plastic tube, toothpaste, cigarettes, matches, and a pair of dungarees. A young Filipino in white trousers and a singlet pushed his way through the jam with a tray containing cold cuts, potato salad, bread, fruit, and a pitcher of milk. He set it on the desk.