He felt his way to the door and opened it. He was just about to step outside when his dazed mind warned him that he did not know which door this was. There were several doors opening from the Engine Control Room. One led to the corridor. The others led to balconies overlooking the engine. If he walked off one of those in the dark, he would simply fall to his death. He laboriously knelt, feeling sick and slightly foolish, and checked with his fingertips. The linoleum of the corridor: not the patterned metal of a balcony. He was safe so far.
His mind had been suggesting subliminally for a time that the battering about his head might have affected his ears. Now he consciously took on the problem and found the logical answer: he was not going deaf, the fire was dying down. He stood again and walked purposefully out into the corridor. Apart from the fitful roar, the ship was absolutely silent. He felt his way along the corridors and up the eerie stairways.
There was dawn light enough to see the charnel house of the crew’s quarters. By the time he made it up onto the deserted bridge, the sun was coming up, bringing the first ghostly tendrils of fog. Martyr sat in the captain’s chair and wondered what he should do first. Wondered what he should do, period. He was the only man left alive on a drifting, half-derelict hulk. It seemed unlikely that she would blow up now, but in becoming less of an immediate danger to Martyr, she at once became a terrible hazard to other shipping. She was drifting, without lights or horn to give warning of her presence, through busy sea lanes in a thickening fog. If the watch officers of passing ships weren’t very wide awake indeed, there could be a major catastrophe here. Which would be all the better for that murderous little bastard Demetrios.
He sat for a long time, thinking dark thoughts about his relationship with Kostas Demetrios, such as it was, and the Greek’s fail-safe scheme. While to Richard the owner seemed American, to Martyr he seemed Greek. Still, the Greek had paid the American’s share up front, quite a lot of money, simply to turn a blind eye to the one extra circuit that would automatically open the sea-cocks — and make sure nobody else got too suspicious about it if they found it — and the money was performing its designated function now; so that even this way the sea was giving back a little of what it had stolen from him.
Obviously, the first thing to do would be to get the generators working again. Without them, Prometheus was worse than helpless. And there was clearing up to be done. He would need light for that. And after. Plenty of light. He needed those generators.
But they were down in the Engine Room where the sun never shone. So, step one was to find another torch. Simple.
Why the diesel-powered alternators should have chosen to switch themselves off when they did was something that Martyr was never able to fathom. There seemed nothing wrong with them when he looked at them closely under the bright beam of a battery-operated lantern some twenty minutes later, and they started with ease. After the first kick and bellow of sound, light flooded the Engine Room and he felt comforted somehow. He patted the bellowing machine and turned away. He had taken four steps precisely when the realization of what he might actually have done swept over him.
When it came right down to it, his involvement, expensively bought, consisted only of one thing: turning a blind eye to the one circuit down here that could not be explained. The one circuit that the real accomplice would close in order to open the sea-cocks, if the generators were still running.
He stood there, frozen with the certainty that this was what his mysterious assailant had been doing down here the better part of twelve hours ago. The sea-cocks had obviously remained closed then, but what if that were only because the generators had failed? What if they were opening now?
Impulsively he turned back and killed the power, plunging the Engine Room into echoing silence and darkness again. He strained his ears. Could he hear the sound of water gushing into her? He could hear little. Not enough to distinguish between imagination and actuality. Cursing quietly to himself, he reached down and lit the lantern again. Was it enough just to cut the wires? He wondered. Possibly. But even in these circumstances his natural professionalism overcame him. He laboriously followed the wire to the hidden switch and checked that it was in fact turned off before he would allow himself to feel satisfied or safe.
He was a man well acquainted with death and it seemed to him fitting that, above all the others, he should have been chosen by fate as an undertaker. He moved the bodies and pieces of bodies — mostly Palestinian — into the ship’s cold room. His inclination was to throw them overboard, but some glimmer of rational behavior stayed alive during those hours, hazed as they were by shock and concussion. Some certainty that at last Prometheus would be found and taken in tow, as she had been to Durban, and then there would be full reckoning for Demetrios, and the dev il to pay.
He lost a day altogether, working like an automaton at instantly forgotten tasks. He slept, without knowing it, wherever his legs gave out, and woke to take up where he had left off, apparently mere seconds later. Night drove him belowdecks because one of the more eccentric side effects of the blast was that, while much of the equipment seemed untouched, every light bulb in the front of the bridge was smashed. He woke at noon on the third day and found himself, much to his surprise, in the captain’s chair on the bridge. His overalls were stiff with filth. His long, aching body stank foully. He was nursing an empty pint bottle of bourbon and the mother and father of all hangovers. His mind, for the first time since the murderer clubbed him with the torch, was absolutely clear.
During the next three hours he toured the ship from stem to stern, giving her a thorough inspection; surprised to find how clean and tidy she was. Surprised to find just how much he had done while concussion blanked almost everything out. The tour, unsurprisingly, ended at the engine, and, as far as he could tell, this, like the generator, was undamaged and would start again, if asked. As long as there was enough oil in the bunker-age. But it would be pointless to get under way. He could not hope to control Prometheus on his own. Far better to let her drift and hope she kept out of trouble. But the idleness, once his elementary engine checks were complete, drove him up to the bridge once more, to keep an eye out for any passing ships.
And so it was that he, standing high and armed with powerful binoculars, though looking almost directly into the setting sun, saw the forlorn specks of the lifeboats long before anyone aboard had any idea that the stricken giant was drifting down on them. His first impulse was to let them know he was here, but it was dismissed instantly. Instead, he veiled his eyes calculatingly and returned to the captain’s chair. Here he sat, lost in thought as the sun set and the three craft closed together. By the time Richard saw Prometheus the chief was in the forecastle head watching through carefully shaded binoculars, taking careful note of who was there.
He had just pulled up the rope ladder when the lifeboats came buzzing in and paused, like strange water beetles, puzzled at the point where it should have been. He gave a lean smile. Good. Now they would have to wait for him to welcome them aboard in his own way. As far as he was concerned, after all, one of them had tried to kill him and the rest had simply left him to die. He found he was deeply disappointed in Richard Mariner, though. He would have reckoned on the tall Englishman for at least one search party. It never occurred to him that the search party might have been fooled by the murderer’s lies. So he busied himself as they explored the other side, and was in position when they came back, with his next few moves at least worked out.