A dark-haired woman who appeared at first glance to be completely nude was huddled on the far end of the right-hand bunk, her back against the bulkhead at the foot of it and her legs drawn up under her chin as if to get as far as possible from the door. One hand was up to her mouth and her eyes were wide with fear, which changed to amazement and disbelief as she stared into his face. She cried out, “Stop! Stop, it’s not him!” And in the same fraction of a second Ingram saw the other one reflected in the panel mirror mounted on the after bulkhead between the bunks. A man was standing just below him, to the left of the steps leading down, a big man, naked from the waist up, with a broad, beard-stubbled face smeared pink with diluted blood running down from a wound somewhere in the sodden mess of his hair. In his upraised hand was a billet of wood, apparently the end of a drawer he’d pulled from under one of the bunks and smashed. He’d been poised to bring it down on Ingram’s head, and when the girl’s piercing outcry stopped him he tried to recover. At the same moment Orpheus lurched over to starboard, and he fell into the water washing back and forth across the cabin sole. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the water with his back against the other bunk, brushed a hand across his bloody face, and looked up at Ingram with a hard and bitter grip.
“Welcome to Happy Valley,” he said. “Where’s the All-American psycho?”
“Get on deck!” Ingram snapped. “Ill be back.” He whirled and plunged up the steps into the open, ducked under the main boom, and dropped into the dinghy. His hands fumbled as he loosed the painter. Two explosive strokes with the oars brought him into the clear past Orpheus’s stern, where he could see across to Saracen. Her position was unchanged except that she had swung around and was lying broadside to.
Rae was alone in the cockpit.
He breathed softly and dug in the oars, feeling sweat begin to run down into his eyes. He came up the broad slope of a swell and ran down the other side like some frenzied, two-legged waterbeetle in flight for its life. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all right. There’s no reason the crazy son of a bitch would wake up. Then, across a hundred and fifty yards of open water, he heard the growl of the starter. Rae was coming to pick him up.
4
He tried to signal to her. At the risk of capsizing, he stood up in the dinghy and frantically sliced the air in horizontal sweeps of his opened hands, but she was bent over the controls now and didn’t see. The starter growled again, and this time the engine started with a coughing backfire that spread gooseflesh between his shoulderblades. One of his oars started to slide overboard. He grabbed it and dropped to the seat again. Muscles writhed across his back as he dug them in and lunged, flinging the dinghy up the side of the swell. He was to blame. She’d been watching with the glasses and had seen the way he’d exploded out of the doghouse and run across the deck, and, knowing only that there was something urgent about his getting back, was trying to help. Saracen was swinging now, under way and foreshortened as she began to bear down upon him. The gap was only a hundred yards, and closing. Some of the fear began to leave him. It was going to be all right. He heard her cut back the throttle and drop the engine out of gear. Then when he turned his head again he felt himself grow cold all over. There was a spot of golden color just to the left of the lined-up masts. It was Warriner’s head. He was standing on the companion ladder, looking aft.
Nothing seemed to move. There was a piercing clarity about every detail of the scene—the foreshortened hull pointed toward him, the little curl of bow wave under her forefoot, the tall spires of Orion achingly white against the sky, and just this side of Rae’s face that spot of gold like a medallion poised on edge above the cambered top of the deckhouse—but the whole thing was frozen like a single frame of motion-picture film with the projector jammed. Saracen was seventy-five yards away, with Warriner’s head just beginning to turn. A few seconds either way could decide it, but they were something over which he no longer had any control.
Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he actually had forgotten the people he’d locked in there to drown. Or if he’d really been asleep, maybe his reaction time would be off just enough to make the difference— The film jerked then, between the down-thrust oars and the stroke, and the projector began to run. Warriner’s head swung on around, and he saw the dinghy and the sinking Orpheus beyond. He leaped the rest of the way into the cockpit, and his figure merged with Rae’s.
Ingram heard the engine race, still out of gear. It slowed and came back up again almost in the same instant, with the load on it now. Which way would he turn? At the risk of a fraction of a second’s raggedness in the beat of the oars, he had to turn his head and look. Saracen loomed over him less than four lengths away, the gap closing faster now as she gathered speed, but she was already beginning to swing to starboard. He dug in his left oar and spun the dinghy around almost at right angles to cut across her course.
Saracen, in a hard-over right turn, was on his left now. He could see Rae fighting to reach the ignition switch. Warriner, holding the wheel with one hand, threw her back. She fell to her knees on the short section of deck aft of the cockpit, but sprang up and flung herself on him again. Ingram’s eyes stung with sweat, and the oars were bending as he threw the dinghy forward. The engine roared at full throttle; Saracen’s bow was swinging off faster now than he was gaining, but the stern was still coming down toward him. Twenty yards … fifteen … The locked and struggling figures in the cockpit suddenly burst apart. Warriner’s fist swung, and Ingram saw her fall. She lay in a crumpled heap on the afterdeck, unmoving, one arm dangling over the stern as if she were calling out for help. Ten yards … four … three … The turn was completed now, and the stern was beginning to draw away from him. He gave one more desperate heave on the oars, stood up, and flung himself at the rail. The dinghy kicked backward under him. His outstretched hands were two feet short, and then he was in the churning white water under the quarter.
He was already behind the propeller, or he might have lost an arm. He felt the solid kick of the water thrown back from it whirl him over, and then his head was above surface and Saracen’s stern was ten yards away. It dipped as her bow rose to an oncoming swell, and for an instant he could see Rae’s figure face down on the afterdeck, her hair very dark against the bleached and weathered teak. “Jump!” he yelled. “Jump! Get off!” She lay motionless.