The wind shifted, the squall passed, and the skies began to clear. He churned onward, fighting to stay alert, searching for the flash of the strobe. Tossing it in blindly had seemed afterwards like a knee-jerk mistake. Now it was his only hope.

In the darkest corner of his mind lurked a depressing fact. He had already searched these waters twice today, at the end of each leg, in the morning and the afternoon. And he had not seen the strobe.

But that was in daylight. How could you see a strobe in the sunlight?

Well, you could, sometimes, if you watched.

Bullshit.

It had to be flashing somewhere ahead

And he would find it. Before dawn.

And she would be waving it when he did

He heard a heavy thump. Suddenly he was on his back, looking up from the cockpit sole at a dancing, gibbous moon.

He had passed out at the wheel and dropped behind the binnacle. The thump had been his head on the deck. He had nicked his bare scalp.

He got up and came back on course. He put a foot on the coaming, one hand on his usual shroud, and pulled himself erect.

Balancing there, he could hardly fall asleep again, unless he wanted to fall in himself.

He had half an hour to go to where the logbook said she had fallen.

He wouldn’t see her this soon, but he resumed the search anyway.

The sun lay low behind him as they steered through the break in the Takarava reef. His eyes were on Lindy, perched on the spreader. Her binoculars, useless now that he had committed the boat, dangled from her neck. She had seemed scared at sea, but now that the chips were down, was apparently calm. At least, she was out of easy earshot. Her passing doubts would be no problem at all.

The problem lay in a certain imbalance of nature. He was pitting a 120-cubic-inch engine against a billion cubic yards of water that, drawn by a phantom moon, had somehow to get from the 100 square-mile lagoon ahead through an eighty-yard channel to the ocean. The pass was the only neck to the bottle, and it was full of water rushing the wrong way.

Impossible, of course, but the alternatives were equally poor. Darkness threatened. He’d concealed from Lindy how crazily his navigation had suffered under the drunken currents they’d breasted so far. His sights had shown him that, last night, they had been set to the westward four miles for every hour of darkness; the night before they had been swept directly east. They were lucky to have found Takarava at all, before they ran on a reef in the dark.

He had been an idiot to try to cut through the Archipelago, but it was too late now to get them out.