The younger man unscrewed the bottom part of a pipe which came up from the floor at right angles to the overhead valve and then joined it. He stuck a stainless steel tube into the opening, checked his watch, and pulled the tube out again. It was covered with oil, which seemed to satisfy both of them. They tightened up the pipes again and wiped their hands on their grimy boiler suits.

At that point they realized I was there, or perhaps just realized I wasn’t a regular member of the team. Sheridan put his hands to my head to bellow an inquiry at me. I bellowed back at him. It was obvious that no one could conduct a conversation over the roar of the engines. I yelled in his ear that I would talk to him at dinner; I wasn’t sure he heard me but I turned and climbed back up onto the main deck.

Once outside I breathed in the late afternoon air thankfully. We were well away from the shore and it was quite cold. I remembered my bag resting among the coils of rope behind the pilothouse and went back there to take out my heavy sweater and put it on. I dug out a tam and pulled it down over my ears.

The engines clattered at my feet, less loudly but still noticeably. Turbulent water lifted the stern periodically, giving the Lucella a choppy, lurching ride.

In search of quiet I walked down to the bow. No one else was outside. As I walked the length of the ship, nearly a quarter mile, the noise gradually abated. By the time I reached the stern, the frontmost tip of the vessel, I couldn’t hear a sound except the water breaking against the bow. The sun setting behind us cast a long shadow of the bridge onto the deck.

No guardrail separated the deck from the water. Two thick parallel cables, about two feet apart, were strung around the edge of the ship, attached to poles protruding every six feet or so. It would be quite easy to slip between them into the water.

A little bench had been screwed into the stem. You could sit on it and lean against a small toolshed and look into the water. The surface was greeny black, but where the ship cut through it the water turned over in a sheen of colors from lavender-white to blue-green to green to black—like dropping black ink onto wet paper and watching it separate into its individual hues.

A change in the light behind me made me brace myself. I reached for the Smith & Wesson as Bledsoe came up beside me.

“It would be easy to push you in, you know, and claim that you fell.”

“Is that a threat or an observation?” I pulled the gun out and released the safety.

He looked startled. “Put that damned thing away. I came out here to talk to you.”