Dead Calm by Charles Williams Page A

chilling one. She’d never make port. And their pumping and bailing would accomplish nothing except to postpone from one hour to the next the moment she’d finally give up and go to the bottom.
    When the breeze had stopped, they’d all three returned to throwing water out of her. Twenty minutes ago, after over an hour’s furious and unceasing effort, they had lowered the water level in the main cabin to a depth of around six inches. Their bailing buckets were coming up less than half full each time. He’d knocked the others off for a brief rest and questioned them. Had they hit anything? Driftwood, or a submerged object of any kind? In mid-Pacific, this was admittedly farfetched, but there had to be some reason for all that water.
    It was Mrs. Warriner who supplied most of the answers. “No,” she said. “If she did, we didn’t feel it.”
    “When you were running on power, was there any unusual vibration?” If they had a damaged propeller or bent shaft she might have opened up around the stern gland.
    Mrs. Warriner shook her head. “No, it was perfectly normal. Anyway, we haven’t used the engine in over two weeks.”
    “We used up all the gas trying to find Clipperton Island,” Bellew said. “Prince Hughie the Navigator knew where it was, but somebody kept moving it.”
    She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply. “How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.
    There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks ago when they were trying to beat their way back to Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded heavily.
    “And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more pumping to keep her dry?”
    Mrs. Warriner nodded. “I think so. But it wasn’t all of a sudden. Just a little more each day. And it must have been about three days ago it began to get really bad and come above the cabin floor when she rolled.”
    “How was the weather then?”
    She thought. “Nothing stronger than light breezes, as I recall. But the day before was squally and rough, and she pitched quite a bit.”
    Ingram nodded and spoke to Bellew. “When you get your breath, turn to on the pump. I’m going below to see what I can find, and I’ll relieve you in half an hour.”
    He was going through the doghouse when the thought of Rae poured suddenly through the defenses of his mind again, leaving him shaken and limp. No matter how you barricaded yourself against the fear, it lurked always in ambush just beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what you can’t.
    Below, in the sodden ruin of the cabins, he’d checked the obvious things first, all the plumbing leading through the hull below the waterline. There were two heads. He couldn’t get a good look at the pipes because of the water swirling around them, but he could feel them with his hands. He wasn’t looking for a minor leak, but a flood. They were all right; none of them were broken. He crawled through a hatch into the flooded engine compartment under the doghouse. The big two-hundred-horsepower engine was submerged to its rusty cylinder head in oily water surging from side to side. He groped around for the intake to the cooling system and examined the line with his hands. It was intact. Then the leaks had to be in the hull itself—God alone knew where—and there was no way to find them unless you could get her dry inside so you could look.
    But you couldn’t lower the water with the pump alone, and the buckets were useless