He tightened a knob on Irwin, giving the vane control and freeing himself to act. He ducked below, checking the time on the chronometer above his chart table. 1720 Greenwich, 0320 local. Less than two hours until dawn.

He leaned on the chart table, chewing a pencil. He subtracted three minutes from the present time, call it 0317. Say he had discovered her gone at 0317. He reached for their logbook in a line of publications above the chart table. Strangely, it was not where they left it. He searched the cabin wildly, throwing clothes and books and pillows everywhere. If he found the log with its half-hour entries, it could give him a clue as to when she had last been aboard.

The log was nowhere, and there was no more time to waste searching for a book when he should be searching for his wife.

So he penciled a shaky dead-reckoning position on the chart and labeled it 0317. He picked off the latitude and longitude with dividers. His hands trembled so badly that he had to do it twice, and even then he could not keep the figures in his mind and he had to check it again.

He finished. He hurtled through the cabin and clicked on the radio-telephone. He switched to the international emergency frequency—2182—and called Mahina Radio in Papeete, over and over.

Papeete was only seventy miles northwest, but he got no response. He began to broadcast blindly, anyway: Mayday, followed by his latitude, longitude, and present course. When his French became confused, he shifted to English.

When he still raised no reply, he decided that his signal was being blanked by the crags of Moorea fifty miles to windward.

It was then that he had lunged back topside, swung up the ratlines, and begun the useless predawn vigil from the shrouds. He had stayed until the failing wind forced him to take over the helm.

Now, still not knowing when she had gone, he forced his attention back to sea and the skies. The sun had finally edged its way up behind the mushroom clouds abeam, tinting their summits pink. Steering with his foot on the wheel, eyes taut with fatigue, he tried to estimate how much time he had to douse the mainsail before the first squall hit him.

The cloud-matador had somehow changed to Marie Antoinette, hair towering. She looked frail in her bustle, but her trailing skirts of rain were just as dangerous as the matador’s cape. There might be time enough to drop the mainsail before the folds of her train enveloped him, but to do so meant taking his eyes again off the sea.