— the thunder of the wind across the ruined masthead eighty feet above her, real, tangible, putting her mind at rest.
She looked back down at the boat again. It was much nearer now, fifteen feet almost dead ahead and at last there was something…
The high white side rolled down suddenly, a freak wave running across the rest. It was a momentary thing, over in a flash, but surely she had seen…
“Hey, hello the boat!”
…yes, she was certain she had seen…
“Hello the lifeboat, can you hear me? Hey!”
…two or three figures. The outlines of some heads and shoulders clinging to the side.
Why didn’t they answer? Perhaps they were too exhausted. But she was certain of what she had seen. With rekindled excitement she let go of the safety rail and began to pull herself to her feet. It took her two painful attempts to unlock the damaged knee, but as Katapult’s head creamed over the remaining ten feet toward the lifeboat, the glassy swell washing over Robin’s feet began to darken with oil-tar so she pulled herself to full height. Then she began to maneuver the unwieldy length of the boathook out toward the white gunwale before her.
But then another wave ran counter and for all her fortitude she began to scream.
It was full of corpses. They lay toppled on the bottom in a twisted pile in a range of attitudes that suggested they were reaching out in their last instant of life. And what they were reaching for remained. At the far side of the boat, frozen in the act of climbing aboard were five more men, their hands still entwined with the dead hands in the boat. Five figures, stark against the dazzling blue of the ocean, all of them clustered along the port side, their weight enough to give the boat its list, reaching with both arms inward, the gunwales snugly under their armpits, their dusky, bearded faces mottled, bloodless, as gray as the bridge of their stricken ship had been. Eyes staring blindly, mouths screaming silently. All but one looked straight at Robin; they had been dead for a day at least but were still howling for help. The last one, the stern-most of them, was looking away, staring down into the water behind him. What little Robin could see of his face wore the most terrible expression of all.
He was staring down, horrified, frozen, in apparent fascination at the fact that his body ended just above the waterline. Another wave slammed into the far side of the doomed lifeboat, lifting the hanging figure high enough for Robin to see all too clearly where a shark had taken him off at the ribs like a chain saw.
She let the boathook slip into the ocean, turned, and ran. All thought of challenging the fear was gone: nothing mattered except the overwhelming need to escape the horror of the sight. She sprinted back down Katapult’s deck, her wet shoes miraculously finding a clear path between the gathering hump of the cabin side and the low gunwale; her knee holding up uncomplainingly until she was back in the cockpit.
At her first cry, Richard cut the engine and spun the wheel back, taking Katapult’s head — and the person on it — away from whatever threatened. He was half out of the cockpit on his way to help when she brushed past him. He followed for a step or two, but she made it plain she needed no help. He returned to the starboard, therefore, to see what was to be done.
He had not put the wheel far enough over. Katapult had not moved away from the lifeboat, but collided with it at a glancing angle and gathered it to herself, collecting it like an errant chick under the wing of her starboard outrigger. Richard froze with horror; nausea threatened to overcome him and he turned away, haunted by the gentle thump, thump, thump of the lifeboat.
The afternoon closed down on them in a dreadful silence; all sound and motion were driven from the face of the sea. Thump went the boat, and everything seemed to stop.
A rumble of thunder, much nearer than any other.
Thump went the lifeboat.
A faint whisper of wind came and grew in intensity. Something completely different from the monsoon they had been following so far. This was a dangerous wind, a wind with a purpose.
Katapult heeled over. The lifeboat rattled and thumped between the hull and the outrigger. The dead men lying in her stirred; the dead men hanging at her side danced merrily, holding hands as though they were playing a ghastly children’s game. Then the spray-mist that had hung over them for days began to clear, vanishing downwind as though rushing off to see what the wind was going to see.
Richard and Robin came out of their trances, both of them suddenly very cold indeed. Their eyes met and they were in action at once, everything else forgotten. Something was very wrong here and this was no time to be sqeamish: they had to search the lifeboat and then get Katapult away from here as quickly as they could.
Richard gave her a hand as she hopped up and out along the runway again. By good fortune, Katapult had snagged the boathook as well as the boat, so Robin concentrated on that, on the bright orange buoyancy handle at its end with its wrist-loop for safety. She plunged her hand into the icy ripples and caught it first time. Then she pushed its bright hook into the stern of the restless little boat and leaned back, holding it still, keeping her eyes closed tight.
It was only now that Richard seriously thought about calling the other two. Searching a twenty-foot lifeboat containing more than ten dead bodies was not something one person could do efficiently or quickly. And the need for speed was suddenly impressed on him. The stern-most of the upright figures seemed suddenly to move. Richard looked up, shocked out of his meditation, in time to see a battered cap fly off the figure’s frozen head and spin away, carried by the same eerie wind through which the ripples were running and the oily spume was beginning to fly.
Whatever was happening, whatever squall was coming down on them, he would awaken the others only when he was ready to get Katapult under way. Either he looked in the lifeboat now or nobody would ever look in it. He had hesitated for less than a second and he moved.
Even as he stepped down into the floating charnel house of the lifeboat, one thing became obvious — this boat had also been strafed. Strafed from wave-top level. The scene came vividly alive in his mind’s eye: the huddle of men trying to pull their shipmates aboard, the bullets going among them, the remorseless sharks coming. His face expressionless, Richard secured a line to Katapult’s low rail and began to check more carefully. There were no documents, no radio or navigation equipment in sight. But the corpses were clustered — piled — in the bottom of the lifeboat, their arms reaching upward like the tentacles of sea anemones, seeming to wave in the rising wind. If he wanted to check further and get at any of the lockers, he would have to undertake the grim business of moving them.
The most obvious place to start was at the stern, where the fewest corpses and the largest lockers were. He began to move down the boat and found his attention caught not by the corpses but by Robin, toward whom he was moving. The sight of her called to him and he made his way toward her carefully. At the stern, he paused, holding the lower end of the boathook and looking up along its length at the beloved figure standing mere feet away tense and strong, her eyes closed, her face blank. A feeling of love and pride overwhelmed him and, had she not been beyond his reach he would have held her tightly to him.
Then something forced his eyes to look past her, downwind, to the place toward which the haze and spray were rushing. In that instant, the mist was plucked away.