Weary made no direct reply. His massive, golden body was like a statue as he forced his will through the wheel to the delicate, intricate machine he had built. As if he had not heard what they were saying, he yelled, “I may need some help here.”
“Richard’s stronger than me,” shouted back Hood cheerfully. He had lost at arm-wrestling to Mariner a couple of nights ago and was happy to take his revenge by sending Richard over to help with the wheel now. But Richard welcomed the challenge. While Robin and Sam Hood had been working at the bow of the boat, he had been working at the stern, and, satisfied now that everything there was as safe and secure as he could make it, he was looking for something else to do in any case. Weary moved sideways and Richard covered the Australian’s hands with his own. The impact of trying to control Katapult under the circumstances, the elation of it, nearly made the Englishman shout aloud.
Hood continued telling Robin his story. “Weary lifted me up by the shoulder straps and ran me the rest of the way. Like I was a feather!” he shouted. “Up to the Huey in a couple of seconds and hefted me in. The others grabbed me and pulled me up. Sort of rolled me over as they did so and my arm hit him in the head. Knocked his helmet off. Now I was wide awake at the time and my fucking leg was really starting to hurt so I can be damned sure about what happened next. I c’n still see it if I close my eyes. Hell, I don’t even have to close them. He jumped in beside me — well, half on top of me really, and I was just fixin’ to say thanks and sorry about the tin hat or something, when this bullet goes right through his head. I mean I saw the sucker — saw it go in and saw it come out. Like it was slow motion, you know? And the whole front of his forehead from his hair down to his eyebrows just sort of flapped open. Like it was a door or something. Just opened like a door. Like a trapdoor. It just flapped open and there was all his brains and shit fixing to fall out all over me.”
“What did you do?”
“Never moved so fast. I just gathered that piece of skin and bone in my hand and slapped it back in place. He sort of twisted round till his head was in my lap and lay there looking up at me. I mean — he was wide awake and all, hardly blinking. Didn’t say nothing. Just lay there looking up. After a while my hand starts shaking. I am holding this man’s head together, you know? and the guy is lying there watching me do it. So I starts looking around for some bandages or something but there’s no goddamn medic in sight at all. But one of them Aussie guys there with him is some kind of beach bum and he’s got this sweatband on his head so I says to him can I borrow it for the kid. And he says sure. So by the time we get to the medical men in Khe Sanh, he’s sitting there looking like some hippy, hardly even bleeding, wide awake and sort of grinning and all that’s holding his head together is that sweatband. Never been parted from it since.
“We ended up in the same medical facility in Khe Sanh. Trapped there for a while. So I got to know him. Felt kinda responsible. And the more I found out the worse I felt. I mean the guy was only nineteen. Same age as most of ours. Wasn’t much older myself. But what this kid had done! He was this high-flying scholarship student. Straight A’s. B.A., summa cum laude from his home school. M.A. from somewhere else — he’ll tell you if you ask, he remembers that. And the Ph.D. from Oxford, England. All this by the time he’s nineteen years old! I mean there was no end to the shit this guy knew. And most of it was spread over the inside of a Huey helicopter — because he tried to help me.
“But he wasn’t Mongoloid, you know? There was no imbecility. No, like, brain damage.” He said the two words in a slow voice and paused to make sure Robin got the message. “He was either totally switched on or totally switched off: Kid Einstein or some kind of cabbage. The doctors told me that’s how it’ll always be. It’s a miracle he’s even the way he is. They were going to put him in some kind of institution but I said no, I’d look after him. Least I could do. You see, he don’t know who he is. Not really. Not deep down. Not anymore. Every time he goes to sleep he forgets. You got to tell him every morning, ‘You’re Doc.’ Then things kinda fall into place. He’s got a family back in Sydney. Nice folks — nothing special, but nice. Might as well be strangers. Show him pictures, he never met them. His home up in Paddington? Never been there. Hell, show him Sydney Harbour Bridge, he’ll ask is it the Golden Gate? Show him the Sydney Opera House he’ll say, ‘What is this?’
“But ask him about Hamlet — it’s like they were brothers. Ask him about quasars or black holes — now there he has lived. Beethoven? Mozart? Now that’s his family. It’s weird. And boats. Nobody seems to know where he picked up this stuff about boats…
“But he did. Oh, brother, did he ever pick up a shitload of stuff about boats…”
They were sitting on the bench at the back of the cockpit by the time he finished speaking. They had been talking there for about three minutes. In all, perhaps eight minutes had elapsed since Weary took the helm; certainly no more than ten. There was nothing else for them to do: their lives lay in the hands of the two men at the helm and, perhaps, in the laps of the gods.
Robin was overcome by a massive wave of emotion — a helpless desire to protect Richard and preserve her family at any cost. But she was all too well aware that there was nothing she could do, and suddenly she was afraid. Her fist closed on Hood’s arm and he looked down at her, surprised. But her face was calm, slightly flushed. Her golden ringlets, soaking, clutched her head despite the wind. Her eyes were sparkling — and how could he know that the light in them came from unshed tears? On the surface, she looked like a girl about some excitement. He half grinned, suddenly feeling less tense himself.
Weary’s hand moved gently out from under Richard’s and the Englishman closed his fist on smooth wood, shifting his feet unconsciously, bracing himself as the wheel tried to hurl him overboard. His concentration was absolute, overriding even the pain in his swollen elbow. His eyes never wavered from the course they were following, at a speed he had never imagined any yacht to be capable of. And yet that speed was increasing steadily. Suddenly the wheel kicked viciously. The angle of the mast clicked nearer upright. And again. He looked up automatically. The angle of the sails had varied slightly too.
Had Katapult been alive before, now she became frenetic. Richard could not credit the intensity of what he was feeling. He had never sailed like this before, never known — never dreamed — that it could be like this. Weary was pulling every knot of speed and power possible from his creation, using the outriggers ruthlessly to force the closer-hauled sails into the rushing torrent of the wind. Then he was back at Richard’s side again, eyes busy on sails and instruments alike, pushing down on Richard’s right hand firmly, bringing them over a point or two, sailing across the main thrust of that terrible force, looking for an outer edge.
“Hood!” Weary’s bellow was snatched away and hurled forward into the great white spray-wall bearing down on them like an avalanche. Richard’s eyes were drawn inexorably toward it. There was very little else to look at now. It curved up and out, more than two hundred feet high, a dancing cliff of the stuff, the overhang at the top of it shadowed and dark. The heart of it — it was translucent, like a cliff of ice — danced madly as though a column of black fire burned there. But the surface drew the eyes and threatened to numb the mind with its insane activity. Although it had unity and form, it was made up of individual things, all in wild motion. Dots made by fist-size chunks of water hurling round the vortex left-to-right across their port quarter at hundreds of miles an hour. And more than the water. Suddenly there was the hull of the lifeboat, dead men dancing out of it, there for an instant, plainly visible mast high, imprinting itself forever on Richard’s mind, then gone as though it had never been.