There was no answer. Maybe he had gone below for a drink of water, leaving her here to be torn to bits. Could sharks hear?

“Mitch!” she screamed suddenly, taking her life in her hands.

His head popped up. At once he was knifing into the water. In a moment he was beside her, looking into her eyes.

“What the hell happened?”

“Elmer—” she whispered. “Let’s go back. Gently, gently...”

“Why?”

“A shark, maybe? Oh, never mind!”

Instead of going he ripped the mask from her head, planted it on his own, and took a long, thorough look below. He shook his head, but they swam back to the boat. He goosed her bare bottom as she climbed the swimming ladder, infuriating her. Now she could not tell him about Elmer, simply couldn’t.

He asked her again what she’d seen. She shook her head. “Nothing. Damn it, I shouldn’t have been so far from the boat. You don’t care at all!”

She strode below, tears in her eyes. She couldn’t explain her anger. It was the heat, probably, the horrible, sweaty closeness of everything in the Doldrums.

But for the next few days, when she swam alone, he watched from the cockpit, and never let her go far.

They were trapped in the Doldrums for twelve days. They had fuel for less than 500 miles under power, but each dawn they started the engine when it was coolest below, and powered for an hour: five miles, to charge the battery and for morale. The engine heated the cabin unbearably. The silence when it quit was lovely, for a while, and then boredom would grip like a vise. They would wait all day for a catspaw of wind, reading, dozing, basting in their own sweat. All work stopped. Nothing got done but the sunsights.

Each day was like the last. Only the daily log, or the radio, told them the day of the week. Time was as flat as the sea.

They were prisoners of the sun. To stay below was unbearable. Topside, under the canvas canopy, it was almost as hot, for there was no breeze at all. Overboard lay their only relief, and two minutes after they climbed the boarding ladder they felt like diving in again.

A squall raced in one afternoon, after teasing them from the horizon all morning. Mitch refused to drop the mainsail and rode it out exuberantly at the wheel.

For five minutes the boat charged blindly through rain-thrashed waters, in a froth-white chamber of wind. The squall pelted the boat with immense raindrops and created a cold breathless shower-bath, which ended just after she had lathered her hair with Halo, but before she could rinse.

Then the clouds swept off, trailing their rain behind them. They found that they had made less than a mile’s progress, and that was their total, under sail, for the day.