In Hazard by Richard Hughes Page B

on No. 2.”
    Rabb blazed up in anger:
    â€œWhy pick on me?” he said. “This isn’t my ship! You’ve got a down on me, you give me all the work to do. Can’t I have a moment’s peace?”
    Rabb was truly furious. Here! He had been working all the day, and night, superhumanly, and always chivvied by the Mate! However, he turned to go: and really meant to go forward, only on the way those stinking black clouds began coming up again over his brain—fear had got him again. So he thought he would take a short rest first, and climbed down a companion; and found himself among the Chinese. Like blind puppies huddling together from the cold. Rabb paused for a moment near them: his fear was re-inforced by their communion of fear, and he began burrowing under them as if to disappear altogether from view.
II
    Once the hatches were secured, Captain Edwardes sought out the steward to see if he could serve a meal. It was only then the Captain learnt there was next to no food to be had, and no water at all. So he and the steward divided out what there was among every man on the ship and served it by the light of the saloon lamp. It was a small breakfast, to follow seventeen hours’ fast: just a biscuit or two each, and a tiny portion of Dutch cheese. The English put a good face on it at once: but the Chinese looked morose, and then went away and got money and offered it secretly to the Mate for extra rations. He could not convince them that there really was no more food to be had, for anyone; that everyone had shared alike. They were so sure that he and the Captain must have kept back a store for themselves, a little of which they might be prepared to part with for a dollar or two.
    But the shortage of drinking-water was even more serious than the shortage of food. The tanks, I told you, were accessible through man-holes in the engine-room floor. But the engine-room floor was sloshing about with sea-water: to open a tank would simply be to spoil whatever was in it.
    Only one of the freshwater tanks had its man-lid in a position where it could be protected from flooding: and that one, as luck would have it, was empty. Or rather, it was technically empty: as empty as the pumps had been able to make it. But the pumps are bound to leave a few inches at the bottom. So Gaston and the steward unscrewed the man-lid, and Gaston was lowered inside with jugs and dippers, and scooped up what he could. It was not much, but it gave them a small wet each; and that would have to last them till they were out of the storm, there was no more to be had. Then, before they replaced the man-lid, they let the flood-water run in, for ballast.
    It was while this was going on that the ship passed out of the centre—if centre it could be called. The second round of the contest had been begun. Or so everyone thought.
    When you pass towards the centre of a hurricane, the wind is (in the main) blowing one way. You cross it, and come out the other side: and there, of course, the wind is blowing the opposite way. As the “Archimedes” came out of the centre, the wind became once more fairly steady in one quarter. But it seemed to be still blowing in the same direction as before.
    Had the ship turned round? Edwardes looked at the compass: no, she was heading much as she had been.
    The “Archimedes,” then, had not crossed the centre: she could not have. She had approached the centre, and then slipped back. She was back again in the same quadrant of the storm as before.
    So the storm was not passing over them: it was sucking the “Archimedes” along with it!
    Seventeen hours had once seemed a long time to have to wait for escape. Now it suddenly dwindled to a short, to a most desirable time. For Captain Edwardes now realised that it was impossible to count on escape even in seventeen hours: to count on escape at all, so long as the sucking strength of the storm continued. It was impossible any longer to count