The Prime Time, out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, droned through swells of molten glass. She was heading due east, under her skipper's hand, halfway between Miami and Cat Cays at the edge of the Great Bahama Bank.

The newscaster, whose face had been proved in a Time poll to be better known to Americans than the Vice President's, lolled in his chair. Idly he raised the tip of the pole, lowered it, raised it again. Boring.

He wondered what his wife—an unsuccessful model half his age—was doing below. Looking for more booze? Suspecting? No. She probably thought she had cleaned out the boat at the Fort Lauderdale dock. To her knowledge there was not an ounce of alcohol left aboard, except beer—which he no longer drank because it fattened his face—for the crew.

He'd pulled the bait-and-switch. He'd deliberately hidden a bottle of Chivas in a locker under the starboard bunk in the crew's quarters, and another in the radar on the bridge. She'd found and removed them both.

But those bottles had been merely bait, to give her something to chew on. It was like writing an anti-network story into the nightly news, to distract the content editor from an item he wanted more. Or, in the old days, leaving a deliberate body-count mistake for the censors in Saigon so they'd miss a story on dope use among the grunts.

He merely had been chumming the waters, and his poor damn wife had bit.

His real cache lay in the bait tank, under swarms of flashing blue-green dorados. The Chivas was in Pepsi Cola bottles. She hated the feel of squirming fish—he or his skipper always had to bait her hooks—and he'd known she'd never dip in there to look.

He tried to remember how many bottles were left. He couldn't; his mind wouldn't compute in the sun.

Last night at a wineless dinner, swinging at anchor off Elliott Key, they'd watched his holiday replacement, Charles M. Holycroft, on the tube.

The son of a bitch was after his job: there was no doubt. He'd opened, all boyish charm and naïveté, with a wide-eyed story of administration corruption. He'd wrapped, with tears in his eyes, on a blue-eyed eight-year-old bringing up abandoned siblings in a filthy Brooklyn slum.

"We'll have to watch his ratings," his wife said. "He didn't fluff a line."

"Meaning I do?"

She patted his hand. "Well..."

All right, last week he had blown two. And the studio was talking about too much sauce in the makeup room. Screw 'em, let 'em talk. He needed a drink. He headed aft, for the bait tank.

"Look," she'd called. "You know? You'll wipe him when you're back."

He never should have come. The minute you let up, some kid five years out of broadcast school was snapping at your heels. Not even a goddamn newsman, just an actor reading news.