The filmy scud astern was overtaking him. Ahead, under fat-cheeked stratus, he could see Maupiti, like a small streamlined battleship on the far horizon. It would soon be lost. He took a bearing so that he could avoid it when it disappeared. He caught a stinging slap of spray across his face. The wind had shifted dead south, opposing the swell, and the seas were rising. He set Irwin to leave Maupiti to starboard.

He eased the sheets. Linda Lee began to gallop at six knots, under jib and mizzen, on a broad port reach, her best point of sail. He wanted all the sea room from Bora Bora, and Maupiti too, that he could earn before the wall of the cyclone hit.

A fine drizzle began. He went below to put on oilskins and see when the center would catch him. Lindy was forward, changing. He surveyed the cabin. All he had been able to lash down was secure. The hidden pig-lead ballast he put from his mind.

He tuned in Mahina Radio. Arlene had passed 120 miles north of Tahiti. Swells were gigantesques in Papeete Harbor and there were gale winds at the airport. Satellite pictures put Arlene now fifty miles northeast of Huahine. She was moving at eighteen knots, three times their own speed. She seemed still to have Bora Bora dead in her sights.

Lindy lurched from the forward compartment. She wore torn cut-offs. She looked sick. She had apparently lost her sea legs. She clutched a handrail against the roll. She seemed exhausted, but calm. He suspected that she thought of what was coming as simply another storm. Well, he had tried to leave her behind...

“Mitch,” she said, “you’ll have to talk to me, you know. I’m here!"

He studied her face in the gloom of the skylight. There were tiny lines at her eyes that he had hardly noticed before. But she was beautiful as ever. If only he had gone to California, or to Tahiti to meet her, or had shown more balls in Nuku Hiva or Papeete when the danger-flags were flying, if only the fucking Frenchman had run a day early for sea room...

The hell with that! It was not his own fault or Jean-Paul’s, or the cyclone’s. It was hers.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “You’re tired.”

“Meaning?” she flared.

“Meaning,” he blurted, “you didn’t get much last night.”

Predictably, her eyes grew wet. Let them. “You’re going to need your rest,” he persisted. “I mean it. Now!”

She crawled into the leeward bunk, turned her face away, and was still. There was no reason, damn it, to comfort her, or time, even if he were flabby enough to try.

A drumroll of raindrops rattled the skylight. He would have to go topside to relieve Irwin before the vane was hurt. But he found himself delaying the move, leafing through Bowditch, for Tropical Hurricanes.