As they passed beneath the accommodation ladder, he hit the button on its electric motor and, silently on desert-booted feet, he ran for the shadows of the black-windowed bridge.
The accommodation ladder clanged down to its fullest extent and stopped. They sat and looked at it in an awed, superstitious silence. Then Ben stood up in the first boat’s bow. “Someone alive up there after all,” he called cheerily. “Hope it’s the chief. Still feel bad that we didn’t manage to find him.” Then he sprang nimbly out and up. John automatically took his place, leaning out and holding the boat still, looking up after the first officer with the ghost of a frown.
Ben vanished up onto the deck, hallooing cheerfully, but there was no reply, and after a moment, his tousled head was shoved out over the side. “Nobody here. No hide nor hair. Damnedest thing.”
Richard sat for a moment longer, face like a mask, mind racing. More mystery. He, too, hoped it was the chief, but this behavior was too eccentric for the American — unless Martyr was motivated by something as yet unknown to him. But there was certainly someone left alive on board. He would find out soon enough who it was. In the meantime it was nearly full night and he had to get the wounded aboard. He rose stiffly, raising a hand to Robin to warn her that he wanted her to stay where she was for a moment; then he stepped carefully down the boat past John and climbed swiftly up the ladder.
Stinking, strange-atmosphered, inhabited by mysteries or not, it seemed to him as he came onto the deck that Prometheus was glad to see him. But that was perhaps mainly because he was so pleased to be back.
Ben was busily examining the top of the ladder. “Might have tripped as we passed under it…”
They both listened in the silence above the muttering from the boats below. The ladder was powered by electricity. That meant the generators had to be on, but it was hard to tell down here. And the bridge was in darkness. They looked at each other, already almost lost in the gloom.
Then, unexpectedly, with a sort of silent explosion, all the navigating lights and most of the forward deck lights came on.
“It has to be Martyr,” said Richard decisively. “You oversee the unloading of the boat. I’m going up to the bridge at once.”
Ben hesitated. “He’s acting pretty strangely, Dick. Maybe I’d better come up with you.”
“No. I’d say he tripped the ladder then ran back to get the lights on before it got absolutely dark. Nothing strange in that.”
“If you say so. You’re the boss. All the same, I’ll get a couple of Malik’s heftiest up here first in case anyone needs restraining.”
Richard walked briskly down the deck, his mind switching from speculation to planning; his eyes wringing the last drop of information out of the gathering shadows as the deck lighting, also smashed by the explosion, sought to hide the wounded deck and bridge-house in darkness. But a simple sense of equilibrium told him of some of the damage, for the deck canted up increasingly steeply on his right, as he came past the last of the three tank caps nearest the bridge. Unable to resist, he walked to the edge of the gaping pit where the Pump Room hatch had once been and looked down into the black void. There was nothing to see. The stench was overpowering. He did not tarry long.
The lights in the A deck corridor were on and the brightness nearly dazzled him. There was no doubt here: he could hear the generators clearly and even feel the hum of them through his feet. Even so, he did not trust the lift, preferring to pound up the stairs two at a time.
The instrument panels, most of them miraculously still working, lit the bridge with an eerie green glow, in which he could just make out the figure of Martyr sitting in the captain’s chair. At once he thought about Ben’s concern. What if he had cracked during the last three days? But his voice sounded calm enough. “Hello, Captain. Welcome back aboard.”
“Evening, Chief. You the only one here?”
“Only one alive.” Martyr turned and Richard gasped. The chief’s face was a total wreck. Brows thrust out above swollen eyes. The nose was out of line. The lips, simian in their thickness, were split in several places. The high forehead was welted and raised in mountainous lumps. There was dried blood at the corners of nostrils and eyes, and in the ears.
Without thinking, Richard was in action. As first officer, he had acted as medic on enough ships to know the basics. His hands gently took the ruined face and probed with infinite care, checking for telltale tenderness that would tell of fractures. There seemed to be none. Martyr’s bright eyes watched him quizzically. “Teeth?” Richard asked.
“Still in place,” answered Martyr. “You should have asked about my heart. The shock I got when I first looked in a mirror damn near killed me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nobody except the sedated got much sleep that night. Martyr’s job of cleaning had been rudimentary. There was still much that needed immediate attention even before the bridge could be properly manned or the great engine restarted.
Of course, Richard’s dream of bringing the great ship to port in better condition than when she sailed had necessarily gone by the board, but there was some tidying and painting that had to be done. All the windows needed boarding or replacing. Electrical light was needed at any price, and it returned to the bridge-house little by little. Only the places that needed to be used regularly were illuminated, as and when necessary, for light bulbs were now few, because, as Martyr had observed, all those in the blast area had been broken. The radio shack was sealed and left in darkness, finally, because there was no way of fixing the ruin in there.
Martyr and his team, shaken to a man by the sight of his face, but warily silent and apparently incurious, had the engine started before first light next day, so the new dawn found Prometheus under her own power, sailing determinedly north, back onto her old course.
All the navigating equipment had survived except the suspect Sat Nav, so John brought up his beloved sextant to replace it, and, because the chronometers also seemed undamaged, this was quite good enough.
Richard sprang awake and automatically looked at his watch. 07.30. Last half hour of John’s watch. Half an hour until Robin took over. He looked down at the golden crown of her sleeping head lying lightly on his chest. The emotion that swept over him as he looked at her was so poignant it made him feel like a boy again, stunned by the beauty of a world that could contain so much happiness; so much excitement. For the last few days he had lived on a plateau of contentment above any he had ever known, knowing that she shared it with him.
They lay, fully clothed, on the bunk they had collapsed on the night before. Her arms and legs wound round him, clutching him to her. He smiled and returned her gentle embrace for a few moments, luxuriating in the feel of her, then he softly disentangled himself and rose. As he put his feet on the floor, something chimed quietly: a tray with cups and saucers, sugar and reconstituted milk. And a thermos of teak-dark tea. Richard smiled. Ho’s one concession to the emergency was the thermos — he would not wake his captain at 06.30 anymore; nor would he let his captain’s tea go cold while he slept. He opened it and poured himself a cup, then left it uncorked by the head of the bunk, knowing the warm fragrance of the hot tea would waken Robin more effectively than anything except the emergency siren.
With his cup in his hand, he crossed to the vacant windowframe to look down across the scarred deck, through the balmy morning toward his distant goal. If they had maintained course and speed through the night — and if they had not, he would have been informed — they should be north of Cancer by now. The Canaries and the Azores beckoned temptingly: they still had not sighted another ship. They were still in enforced radio silence. There was, creeping over the men, a sort of fantastic suspicion that something unimaginable had happened to the rest of humanity, some unannounced holocaust that had left them alone in all the world. Like the Flying Dutchman, whose waters they had so recently crossed. But Richard was not going to stop at any of the islands unless he absolutely had to. He was going to take her home. If they limped into some safe harbor on the way, they would simply be taken off and flown home, leaving the massive, impersonal machinery of the investigation to work itself out distantly from them while they were occupied with other things. Like getting on with the rest of their lives. There was a temptation, but Richard could not entertain it. He could not allow the resolution of all this to come about through the workings of others: men and women who had not earned the right, as his crew had, to lay bare the whole truth of the matter.