Dead Calm by Charles Williams

last position should be in the logbook, but he didn’t trust their navigation. He’d had a good fix from three star sights just at dusk last night; from that, by dead reckoning, they’d made twenty-five miles along a course of 235 degrees. That should be Saracen’s position at dawn when he’d sighted Orpheus . She was—call it five miles away, on a bearing of 315. That would put her here.
    He penciled a cross on the chart: 4.20 South latitude, 123.30 West longitude. The Marquesas were roughly twelve hundred miles to the west southwest, the Galapagos over two thousand miles behind them, and elsewhere nothing but thousands of miles of empty ocean. The chances of their being sighted by a ship were to all practical purposes nonexistent.
    And as for ever catching up with Saracen, even if they could find her … Face it, he thought. She was already far over the horizon, making six knots under power. And when her fuel ran out, she could still outsail this waterlogged hulk with nothing but her mizzen and somebody’s shirt.
    “The wind’s heading us,” Mrs. Warriner called out from the cockpit. He went back on deck. The breeze had veered around to the southwest, and she had bare steerageway on a course that was now a little east of south.
    “We’ll come about,” he said. He cast off the genoa sheet, carried the sail forward around the stay and outside the starboard shrouds, and trimmed the sheet on the port tack. They were steering 275 now, which was 35 degrees to the west of the course they wanted. But in a few minutes the wind went further around to the southward and they were able to come down to 245. Then it died out momentarily and sprang up again out of the northwest. He carried the genoa around again. Ten minutes later the wind began to soften once more, and then died with complete finality. Orpheus slogged forward a few feet, came to rest, and began to roll heavily in the trough. He looked around the horizon. In every direction the surface of the ocean had the slick, hot glare of polished steel.
    They’d made less than a mile. It was 12:10 p.m.
    * * *
    Her face hurt. It was lying on something hard that went up and down and wove back and forth the way the floor had the only time in her life she’d ever been drunk, and there was that same sick feeling in her stomach. Somewhere a long way off there was an engine sort of noise that seemed to have been going on forever, and just audible above it, or through it, a voice was singing. It was an old, very sentimental popular song, one she hadn’t heard for years, but it was still familiar. What was it? Oh. “Charmaine.” That was it. She rolled over. Some powerful light glared beyond her closed eyelids, and she grasped that it was sunlight. She opened them and squinted with pain. Just beyond her was a pair of wide and very sun-tanned shoulders surmounted by a gold-thatched head. At the same moment the head turned, still singing, and Hughie Warriner regarded her with concern, which gave way to evident relief. He smiled. It was a charming and affectionate smile, and there was something almost chiding about it. She tried to scream, or to move, but could do neither.
    The song stopped. “See, you’re all right,” he said. “Now aren’t you sorry you made me do it?”

6
    John wasn’t here. The paralysis of shock snapped then, and she screamed. “Where are we? Where are you going? We’ve got to go back!”
    Warriner gave no indication he’d even heard her. She tried to sit up and was assailed by vertigo. The ocean tilted while nausea ballooned inside her, and she collapsed, fighting to keep from being sick. She closed her eyes for an instant to stop the whirling, and when she opened them Warriner had turned forward again to look into the compass. He was sitting in the helmsman’s seat in the back of the cockpit, just beyond her legs. He reached a hand around and caught her left ankle, not tightly or roughly, but merely as though to soothe her or to reassure himself