“Engine room. The first marine engineer was a convict with an oar.”

He went on toward the bridge, and she resumed her silent contemplation of the night. He was an unusual man in a number of ways, she thought; he was obviously well educated, and she knew he spoke fluent French and German in addition to English. She didn’t know what his nationality was. The Leander was under Panamanian registry, but her crew was from everywhere. His name was Eric Lind, so he was probably of Scandinavian descent, as she was herself.

Then it was her own reaction—or utter lack of it—that she was thinking of. What woman, talking to a devilishly attractive man in the moonlight, even if she had no interest in him at all, would indifferently invite inspection in the revealing, close-up flame of a cigarette lighter when her hair looked like a fright wig and her face like something that had been stored for the winter in a coat of grease? You’re hopeless, she thought.

The ship loomed large and distinct ahead of him now, and he knew he was within a quarter mile. She was still lying motionless in the water, but had swung around by imperceptible degrees during the past hour until she was broadside to him, and he could see the green glow of her starboard running light as well as the overall silhouette and a few lighted portholes. She was a freighter, with well-decks forward and aft of the big midships house, and whatever her trouble was it must be in the engine room. There was no sign of fire, or activity of any kind on deck.

Sweat ran into his eyes. There was a sharp pain in his side, making every breath an agony, and his mouth was dry and full of the taste of copper. His hands were on the inflated rim of the raft, pushing it ahead of him as he swam. The dungarees and shirt were inside the raft, and he was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. Normally, he had no particular fear of sharks, but he knew that what he was doing was tantamount to asking to be cut in two, threshing on the surface at night like something wounded and helpless. Well, if one took his legs off, it would be over in a few minutes at most; that beat the other program, the thirst.

Between the lash of urgency and the gray sea of fatigue that was engulfing him, he was conscious of random and disconnected thoughts that made him wonder again if he were entirely rational. There was a haunting impression of déjà vu about the whole thing that baffled him, since neither he nor anybody else in maritime history, as far as he knew, had ever been rescued by swimming over to a stationary ship in mid-ocean and asking for a lift. Ahoy aboard the freighter! You going my way? He giggled, and his fright at this was sufficient to clear his mind momentarily.

He knew then when he had done this before. It was at the hospital after the highway patrol had got Gerry out of the wreckage of the Porsche and called him at the studio, and he had sat in a small room in Emergency with his whole being concentrated like a laser beam into a single state of wanting, of trying to control with an effort of will something that was out of his hands. When the intern and resident had come out and told him she was dead, he had known he would never want anything again. It was all used up. But apparently there was always a little left somewhere, because this was the same thing again. Either the ship would remain there motionless in the water until he reached it, or it wouldn’t. They couldn’t see him in the darkness, and he had no way to signal it.

Three hundred yards. Two hundred. He could see the silhouette of the stowed booms now, and one of the lighted portholes winked off momentarily as though somebody had walked in front of it, but it was still too far and too dark to make out any movement on deck or on the bridge. He tried to increase the beat of his scissoring legs, but he was too near complete collapse. He sobbed for breath. Then, almost as clearly as though he were aboard, he heard the ding, ding, pause, ding, ding of four bells from the wheelhouse, repeated a moment later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. The lookout reported the running lights. I’ll make it, he thought.