Instead it searched for a clue in his memory, a scream or a whistle half-heard in his sleep, that might have awakened him without piercing his conscious mind. If it had been a yell that awakened him, he should be ten miles astern, not here.

He forced his mind back. He had come awake suddenly, an hour and a half before dawn, lying on his back in the starboard bunk in the salon, where he always slept at sea. He had glimpsed the Southern Cross racing across the skylight. He saw it weave amidships, zigzag back, and finally disappear behind the starboard edge of the frosted pane.

The bloodshot eye of the compass at the foot of his bunk stared at him. It cast a glow on varnished cabin beams and tinted the clock and barometer to a brassy rose. All very shippy, he had thought. Once, one of the delights of awakening at sea. But, like everything else, dimmed with a year aboard, and too familiar.

Groggy in his bunk, he squinted at the compass heading. Still SSE. The boat was splitting the expanse of ocean between Huahine and Moorea. They were beating heavily, on the best track they could lay into the trades toward Tahiti.

He pushed himself away from the leeward side of his bunk, where the constant heel to starboard had jammed him. The flowered pareu he used for a sheet was tangled around his ankles. He kicked it loose.

He was sweating greasily. The ports were closed against spray and probable squalls. From a wind-scoop set in a dorade on the cabin top, gusts played over his skin, but the puffs were too moist to cool him. He groped for the fan above his bunk and let its fierce little breath whine the length of his body. Then he shut it off to save the battery.

The ketch groaned and muttered at the seas. Her starboard steering cable chirped in the lazarette, aft. The sound drove the cat crazy and bothered Lindy too. He kept promising her to oil it but at anchor, or tied to the Papeete quai, the cable was quiet and he kept forgetting it.

From forward, where he assumed Lindy lay half-asleep, came the moan of a plank strained a year ago during a haul-out on a primitive marine-railway at Moorea. From aft came a familiar knock. It was the rudder, slamming back and forth in its gudgeon-holes, which were worn too big anyway and had hurricane damage besides. He had been going to replace the massive bronze pintles which rode in the gudgeon-holes, but there was no use doing it now, if they were selling the boat.

The other sounds required no action. The bilges sloshed as always. The baggy mizzen, set taut at sunset for every foot of easting they couldearn during the night, thrummed nervously. From the gargle of water he could hear through the hull he estimated their speed at four and a half knots.