He made ready to cast off from the pier. He had the vague intention of rounding the point and trying to find holding ground in Faanui Bay. With storm anchors down and all his chain out, he would stay aboard until things got too rough. Then, if he had to, he could let her fend for herself and try to row into Faanui Village.

The humidity rose with the sun. He had been plotting the center every hour, using WWV. Now he shifted, trying to follow the staccato French on Radio Mahina. He assumed that the French had a hurricane plane following the storm, and that the location of the center was quite accurate.

When he plotted Arlene at 10 A.M., his hand was so slippery with the high humidity, or with fear, that he dropped his pencil. He stepped topside to cool off. The Star of Peace was winching in, short on her buoy, apparently ready to move to better shelter or to sea. He was afraid that if he rowed out to ask he might be caught by the first gusts.

He surveyed the sky. The cirro-cumulus above Mount Pahia had disintegrated into tangled strands, like hair that needed combing. Far down the corridor of clouds he could see a veil of alto-stratus.

He stepped below again and looked around. Everything seemed stowed, but there were things left undone. He had always intended to secure the hundreds of little blocks of pig-lead in her bilges, carried as additional ballast to ease her roll. There was a ton and a half of it, in three-inch-square pigs, packed tightly for enormous seas but not tightly enough for a knock-down. If a wave in the lagoon knocked her upside-down, the pigs would become four-pound projectiles, rocketing around the overturned cabin; when she righted herself she would be a shambles. It was too late to drill and screw down her floorboards, which came up, at a touch, for inspection. He could hammer nails through the varnished teak-and-holly, or let it go.

It was too hot to tear the boat apart looking for nails. And he was too jumpy to take time to try. Besides, the floorboards were too pretty.

He let it go.

She stood at the Air Polynésie counter at Tahiti International. The flight to Bora Bora had been canceled, put on again, canceled once more, and was now on the verge of leaving, but the little seven-passenger aircraft had not yet left the hangar.

It was hot and very sultry. Departing passengers for Huahine and Bora Bora were jittery. So was the girl at the counter. There was an un-Polynesian air of tension in the place. An easygoing young pilot Lindy had seen before, on the quay and at the Vaima, was berating a Tahitian mechanic in angry French: the mechanic glared at him, spun on his heel and stalked away.