Methúsalem looks sadly around his cabin, then sighs and shakes his head, turns round and puts his hand on the cold, wet doorknob.
The door looks terrible from the inside. It’s soaking wet and covered with glass shards which stick out like spikes.
Methúsalem opens the door to the corridor, but comes to a halt just inside the threshold when his toes hit something on the floor.
He looks down and the minute he sees what’s lying there on the wet rug, surrounded by broken glass, strips of seaweed, sand and pebbles, it feels as if his heart stops beating and his blood runs cold.
There it is. The bolt from the rifle.
‘Good God.’
Guðmundur Berndsen is sitting in the captain’s chair and staring through the salt-encrusted windows of the bridge. He’s put the ship on autopilot and has been sitting there without moving for four hours, since he last stood up to make coffee.
That coffee has long since turned to overboiled tar without the captain having even tasted it.
Rúnar turned up for his bridge watch promptly at three in the morning but Guðmundur sent him back down half an hour later. He’s not in the mood to converse or spend time with men who disobey orders, engage in intrigue and take power into their own hands when their superior officer turns his back.
Over the weather deck floats a yellow haze reminiscent of dry-ice fog. It’s salt spray that takes on this ghostly aura in the beams of the searchlights. The ship rolls, hovers and pitches in turns, so the captain is alternately lifted off his chair, as if weightless, or is pressed into it with so much force he can hardly breathe.
He doesn’t allow these extremes to disturb him, though, but steers the ship to the south without having any real idea where it is situated on the globe. While the GPS is dead he knows neither how fast they are sailing nor how far they are drifting off course. Heading south has limited significance in itself if their starting point is uncertain – which it most certainly is.
Once the storm calms the captain can work out the ship’s position with a sextant, a watch and a calculator, but until then he must keep calm, trust his own judgement and hope for the best.
Sailing in a violent storm is like flying blind. Little by little what you see baffles your senses until your imagination overpowers what you know.
His eyes tell the captain that he’s going in circles but the compass says differently: the ship is clearly heading south. If the captain were to abandon reason he would stop believing the compass, insist it was broken and start going in circles himself.
Guðmundur’s eyes also maintain that the ship is sailing backwards, not forwards. The GPS could correct that misunderstanding within minutes, but without the navigation device the captain has to trust the experience he has gained from earlier battles with the weather in the open sea.
His guess is that the ship is struggling forwards at about five to eight knots. As to sideways drift, it’s hard to say, but he’s hoping it isn’t more than three knots.
However, it’s possible that the sideways drift is greater than their forward movement. In that case the distance they have to sail grows by that difference every hour, instead of getting shorter. In that case it would be better to remain in place, tread water in the roaring sea, maintain a kind of deadlock with the storm while it’s raging.
Guðmundur’s eyes tell him the ship is getting nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but going by the butterflies in his stomach and the dizziness in his head, the ship is flying along on the tops of the waves at three times its top speed.
The captain no longer knows what to think. He’s come to the conclusion that it’s best not to think at all. When rational thought fails, common sense tells you it’s wisest to stop thinking. Irrational thoughts lead to delusions, mistakes and temporary insanity.
So long as Guðmundur does nothing, he’ll do no harm either. He’s sailing south and that’s all there is to it. South is all he knows. It’s not much, but it’s so much more than nothing.
South.
Guðmundur stares out the salt-caked windows and thinks about only what he sees.
There’s a yellow haze over the weather deck, a briny mist that swirls like dry ice on a rock band’s stage, obscuring everything.
‘This storm has been raised by magic,’ murmurs Guðmundur Berndsen, blinking, his eyes bloodshot, dry and swollen after staring for so long.
‘Good morning,’ says Methúsalem as he enters the bridge. The captain looks at his watch for the first time in hours and sees that it’s twenty-three minutes past six.
‘You’re late,’ says Guðmundur, getting out of the chair. He then grabs one of the knobs on the instrument panel to keep from falling when the ship suddenly rolls to port, with the attendant creaks and shockwaves.
Methúsalem holds onto a side table by the chart room and makes his way over the carpeted floor of the bridge. As the ship rights itself the men both seize the opportunity to reach the middle of the bridge without bumping into or knocking each other over.
Guðmundur gets a grip by the chart room and Methúsalem climbs into the captain’s chair.
‘The autopilot’s on,’ says Guðmundur.
‘So I see.’
The men don’t look directly at each other, but each is well aware of the uncomfortable nearness of the other.
Guðmundur is angry that Methúsalem went behind his back and challenged him, and he’s sorry to have hit him with the stock of his gun – really sorry.
Methúsalem is about to lose his mind with fear. He’s afraid of the gun that’s waiting for him in his cabin because he knows he’ll use it.
The only thing he’s not sure of is whether he’ll use it against himself or someone else.
He has a vision of putting the barrel in his mouth, closing his eyes and pulling the trigger.
And that vision frightens him – frightens him terribly.
But he also has a vision of aiming the barrel at Guðmundur’s head and then slowly and surely pulling the sensitive trigger and enjoying his ultimate power with hate in his eyes and a devilish smile on his lips.
And this vision is driving him crazy.
‘I’m having a little meeting in my cabin at two o’clock,’ says Guðmundur as he takes hold of the doorknob to go into the corridor. ‘Me, you, Rúnar and John.’
‘All right,’ says Methúsalem, sinking into the leather chair as the ship lifts itself.
‘We have to bury the hatchet,’ says Guðmundur, opening the door. ‘We can’t go on like this.’
‘I know,’ says Methúsalem, looking over his shoulder. At the same moment the ship drops down and he lifts up from the chair.
For just a moment they look each other in the eye and for that instant they feel the companionship of shipmates, captain and first officer, comrades in seas calm and stormy.
It’s going to be all right, thinks Guðmundur. We’ll talk, sort things out and shake hands.
It’s going to be all right, thinks Methúsalem. I’ll just throw the fucking gun in the sea. Won’t I?
Then the ship slams into a wave so hard that Methúsalem almost flies out of the chair, the door closes with a slam, Guðmundur loses hold of the knob and falls to his knees.
Boom, boom, boom…
The noise is such you’d think the ship was breaking in two, and it rolls so powerfully to port that it’s hard not to believe that the movement will continue and the ship capsize within seconds.
The men in the bridge have seen and heard all these things before, though; they know their ship and don’t doubt all will be well, which is why they don’t even bother to give a sigh of relief when the gigantic hull quietly emerges from the breaker and slowly rights itself, like a whale surfacing.