So the concern in John’s voice as he said to Ben, “Would you mind shining that lamp over here a moment?” was evident to everyone at once.
“What is it?” asked Richard.
“Dunno. This radio…Thanks, Ben…”
The silence returned for a few more minutes, then, “Nope. That’s the damnedest thing. Ben, was it okay when you tested it?”
“Fine,” replied the first mate. Then, with gathering concern, “Why…”
John interrupted him. “Could anyone have put them out of action since?”
“Wouldn’t have thought so…. Captain?”
“You’re right, Ben. It’s not very likely. And the cover was still on when we swung her down.”
“There you are, then,” said Ben morosely.
“But has it been sabotaged?” asked Richard, thinking grimly of what he had been told of the mess in the Radio Shack.
“Hard to tell.” John was still fiddling with it, trying to find out what was wrong. “Probably find that out when I find out why it’s not working.”
Silence returned until they came within hailing distance of Robin’s boat. Then she called across, “Our radio’s been sabotaged. Whole panel of transistors gone. How about yours?”
“The same,” yelled back John.
Ben left the man he was nursing. “Maybe we’d better check in case anything else has been mucked about with since my last full inspection,” he whispered. He needn’t have bothered lowering his voice. His words carried clearly to everyone on both boats.
They looked as carefully as they could under the light of the lamps, and everything else seemed fine until Richard, almost out of sight now of the blazing Prometheus, checked the compass. No matter where it was pointed, the needle remained glued to N on the card. Robin’s was the same. Even when N was pointed due south by the faint, cloud-masked stars, and the overcast gathered rapidly so that the stars soon were obscured. In the end, the captain and his third mate simply put their backs to the distant column of light that marked their wounded ship, and hoped that they were sailing east into an African dawn.
They were still so far from land that the sun rose through the sea ahead. It was a sudden thing, almost like an explosion. One moment the horizon was a steady line above which the cloudless sky was like a duck’s egg gilded with almost transparent foil. Then the sea lit up, first at a point, then from north to south, a dazzling emerald as the sun shone through it. And this was only the beginning. As soon as the rim of the sun peeped over the edge of the world, it sent great beams speeding almost visibly toward them, through the cobweb tendrils rising with silent majesty off the slick backs of the waves. All around them, the huge sea, heaving rhythmically in the dead calm with the great green rollers that would pound Africa in time, was smoking with greater and greater intensity. The nascent fog, rising out of the heart of a warm current into the crisp chill of the clear morning, gave the beams of the rising sun form and substance, seeming to flatten them first into great blades; eventually obscuring them altogether. By midmorning visibility was down to a matter of yards. Richard had a rope secured between the two boats in case they lost each other. The sun became a pale copper disk. At noon, instead of making his usual announcements, the captain said a service for the dead. Nobody felt like eating. The afternoon began to pass. They remained lost, but safely wrapped in a cocoon of coolness. Richard did not look forward to the moment when a blazing tropic sun burned that protective layer away and revealed to them all the immensity of the ocean on which their frail little boats bobbed so helplessly. Prometheus had been so vast that she had kept them utterly apart from the seas they were sailing. The contrast, when it came, was likely to be a shock.
For another day and two more nights they drifted in the fog. The boats, held almost magically in still water at the confluence of three great currents drifting south, nevertheless were pushed by what fitful wind there was so that their heads kept turning north. Indeed, at dawn on the third day, Ben Strong, who had the tiller of the lead boat, looked unbelievingly as the sun lit up the emerald sea behind his right shoulder instead of dead ahead. So surprised was he, for he had been certain that they were heading due east, that it took him a moment or two to realize that the fog had gone. The boats were still tied together and he glanced back into Robin’s boat where Rice was dozing at the helm. Nobody seemed to have noticed how badly off course they were. Good. He put her over and took them in a gentle arc toward the bright new dawn. Richard felt the change at once and looked up from under lowered lids, noting what was happening before he apparently went back to sleep.
Two days in the fog had been frustrating, occasionally almost frightening, but in the end simply a sort of waste of time. With little or no idea where they were heading, they kept only rudimentary logs, though sometime during each watch, the watch officer made some kind of observation on the state of sea, weather, anything else of interest; and added a guess as to where they were and which way they were pointing. There was a surprising lack of tension, even though it was plain to all that they were in the middle of something mysterious, murderous. Richard made sure that they talked the situation through — though he kept his own suspicions quiet — and they concluded with the rueful cheerfulness of people who have been the victims of a practical joke that the saboteur must only have wanted them out of communication for a while: not out of the way permanently. They had plenty of food and water — all untouched. They were in busy sea lanes and not too far from land. They were cocooned by the fog — it was like being wrapped in cotton wool. Apart from the boredom, it might almost have been taken for a holiday. A lark. There was no real sense of danger at all.
The third day changed all that. The sun slid up out of the water into a strange hazy shadow line that in the tropics appears at the foot of the sky on clear dawns and sunsets. Moments later it was filling the sky with a disproportionate amount of glare and both Ben and Rice found themselves steering toward it with their eyes shut, so fierce was the brightness ahead.
The simple change in the weather was enough to alter the tenor of life in the boats, just as Richard had feared it would. As the sun went higher, so the horizons withdrew all around. The wider the horizons became, the smaller the boats seemed. Their total fragility, riding on the back of the Atlantic as though it were some fierce but sleepy monster, was brought home to everybody in an overwhelming rush as they woke. They had grown used to seeing the ocean from a great distance, tamed by the size of the tanker. Now they were face-to-face with it. All too aware of its unimaginable force; its overwhelming capacity for violence. Even its simple depth became a source of fearful wonder. They sat in silence looking over the side. The ocean floor lay some three thousand fathoms, eighteen thousand feet, two-thirds of the height of Everest beneath them.
With visibility so good, there was no need for the boats to remain tied together, so the line was slipped and Robin’s boat came up alongside Richard’s. They both took the next watch and sat, side by side, separated by as little water as possible, watching their crew with increasing concern. John was in his element, of course. Ben was fine. Rice and McTavish weren’t too happy. Malik and Ho were hard at work trying to keep some spirit in their men. While covered with the fog, they had tried all the singing, storytelling, jokes, and games they knew, and now everyone was being required to recall anything new, or to recount the favorites. Under other circumstances it might have been an interesting cross-cultural exercise, but not now. Now everyone watched listlessly as the great swells came out of the west behind them, seesawing them rhythmically, but seeming to push them no nearer to land. Even the stewards had given up betting on which of each series would be biggest.