Dead Calm by Charles Williams Page B

after you got it as low as the cabin sole. Maybe there was a fire ax or hatchet aboard; he could chop away the cabin flooring below those two hatches and drop the buckets directly into the bilge. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light in the compartment now, and he looked around him, studying as much of the hull as was above the water. She was double-planked; he could see the diagonal seams of the inner skin. He took out his knife and began poking it at random into the wood. On the third plank the knife blade went into it as if it were a piece of bread. He felt a chill along the back of his neck and hurriedly started checking everywhere he could reach, even into the water below him. Large areas of the inner planking and of the frames themselves were spongy with dry rot.
    He’d gone back on deck then and asked if there was a diving mask aboard. Mrs. Warriner told him where to find one. After kicking off his sneakers, he’d tossed the end of a line over the port side so he could get back aboard, and dropped in.
    How long? he wondered now, peering upward through the mask. It was impossible to guess; too much depended on the weather. In the first hard squall she’d go to the bottom like a dropped brick. In at least three places just above him along the turn of the bilge where the green hair of marine growth waved endlessly as she rolled, he could see the loose butt-ends of planks sticking out where her fastenings had worked loose. Around them the calking was gone, the seams wide open for the full length of the plank. Keeping a respectful distance from the plunging and deadly mass above him, he swam to the surface and forward, around the bow. The starboard side was even worse. He counted six planks where the fastenings were coming out. He swam back and climbed aboard.
    Bellew stopped pumping, and they came over to him as he stood dripping on deck under the brazen weight of the sun. “Did you find anything?” Mrs. Warriner asked.
    He stripped off the mask and nodded. “Yes. But it’s nothing we can do anything about.”
    “Then she’s going down?”
    “Yeah. I wouldn’t even make a guess as to how long we can keep her afloat, but she’ll never make the Marquesas.”
    “What’s causing it?” Bellew asked.
    “Dry rot. In the inner planking and some of the frames. It’s a disease, generally caused by lack of ventilation, and once it starts it spreads like smallpox. There may have been only a few small patches of it when you bought her, but whoever surveyed her missed ‘em apparently, and now it’s everywhere. What’s happening is that, even if the outer planking is still sound, the fastenings are pulling out; the wood inside is too soft to hold ‘em any more. Pounding in those squalls probably started them working loose, and now just the rolling sets up enough play and enough stresses to pull them out. The inner planking’s no doubt opening up the same way, and the more she works, the looser it all gets.”
    “And there’s nothing we can do?” Mrs. Warriner asked.
    “Nothing except keep pumping.”
    She sat down at the break of the raised deck and lit a cigarette. She blew out the match and tossed it overboard. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ingram. It’s too bad we had to infect you.”
    Still occupied with the practical problem of survival, and its vanishing possibility of solution, he was caught off guard by this lapse into the figurative. “Infect?”
    “With our own particular dry rot. Our contagion of doom. We should have been flying a quarantine flag.”
    Bellew had glanced involuntarily toward the dinghy still bumping against the side. Ingram saw him but didn’t even bother to speak; he merely shook his head. Twelve hundred miles from land, three people in an eight-foot dinghy designed to carry two the hundred yards or so from an anchored yacht to the dock, inside a harbor—a bicycle would be about as practical a lifeboat.
    Bellew shrugged. “So it was stupid.” Then he went on, his eyes bleak.