The breeze freshened, speeding the squall. From below he heard the bulkhead clock strike three bells: 5:30. His euphoria trickled away. Now he became convinced that he had passed her soon after his panicky turn, in the black hours before dawn.

Everything suddenly pulled at him to reverse course and retrace his track. He was wrenched by a gut-feeling that she was astern. The steering cable behind him began to squeal "behind, behind, behind"; the mainsail stuttered: "back-back-back-back.”

He fought the impulse to play the hunch.

She could be just as easily bobbing in the next five miles as in the last ten.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

She was swept to the crest of a swell. It broke in her face. Her eyes stung with the foam. She squeezed them shut, lying back in her float-jacket, always clinging to the plastic jug she had torn from the trailing line.

The morning sun was hot on her forehead. She felt feverish and let her head sink to cool it. If he didn’t find her soon, she’d boil like a lobster.

She guessed from the height of the sun that it was six or seven in the morning. Her guaranteed 300-foot waterproof watch had stopped precisely at dawn. She estimated that she had been in the water for three or four hours.

Her lips were cracked and stinging. Until daybreak she had been freezing. She still shivered momentarily, but now she could not tell if she suffered more from heat or cold. In twelve months in the tropics, she had never bothered to ask him how much the water heated up by day. Maybe by noon she would be warm. But of course he would find her before then.

The floating jacket that was saving her life was the worst of her discomforts. It kept slithering up her nude body and chafing her armpits. The coarse nylon safety belt was rubbing her belly raw too. She kept it on anyway. She had some vague idea that it might help him drag her aboard; already she was too tired to be much help herself. Besides, it was proof that she had semi-followed their rules, even if she had obviously not kept it clipped to a lifeline topside.

She rubbed cautiously under the belt. Doing that, she let the plastic container slip away. The wind caught it and scooted it up the face of a swell. She expended too much energy in a fast little sprint to catch it.

She gripped it firmly, like a baby, then shifted to carry it like a football in the crook of her arm. For hours she had shifted it back and forth. When water would trickle in through its broken hollow handle, she would hold it aloft to drain it. She would plug it for a while with her finger. Then she would forget and it would fill again and she would empty it.