“She should have a Diesel,” agreed Dugan. “Be a shame to lose her in a fire. I never seem to get enough money together...” A breeze set a halyard to knocking, and Lorelei complained of her lines. “Shame to leave her tied up another year, too.”

The whistle at the plastic factory blasted lunch. Dugan glanced expectantly at the bulkhead clock. It chimed seven times: 11:30. Right on. “Well, Mr. Gordon, I’ll think it over. Just don’t sell your house.”

In the car, Mitch hugged her. “You read him. You really read him!”

“I read you.”

“If he sells, and we do decide to move aboard—”

“You’ve decided, Mitch. I’m probably lucky to go along.”

“Quit that!” he warned. He thought for a moment. “We said we’d vote.”

“I just voted.”

“You know,” he murmured, “I love you very much.”

She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

The tropical sun climbed higher. He sat swinging from the cross trees like a weight halfway up a metronome forty feet high. His mass aloft actually slowed the roll but increased its arc. The motion had finally made him queasy.

It was not yet high noon and his skin was seared. He was tanned and used to exposure, but he had not spent so much time topside in months.

Longing again for the cool of the cabin, he glanced at his watch. Eight minutes until time to go below for his noon sight. He felt guilty. She was treading water somewhere and he was looking for an excuse to hide in the shade below.

A salty rivulet ran down his bare belly into his crotch. It was acid to his raw scrotum. He tore his thoughts from bodily miseries to more important things.

Local Apparent Noon was at 11:49. At that instant, he must be taking his second sunshot of the day. So he would hold out aloft until 11:15. His eyes stung from sweat and sunlight. He felt as if he had been diving in salt water without a mask. His back was weakening fast. But his discomfort was not all bad. In the last hour he had caught himself twice nodding in fatigue. If the needle of pain in his sacro had not jabbed him each time he slumped, he might have fallen, dooming Lindy too. When he returned aloft after the noon shot, he had better wear his safety belt and lash himself to the mast.

“The boy stood on the burning deck...” he began. He stopped short. The chanting of doggerel was a symptom of fatigue. Beating back to Bora Bora a few weeks ago, with the hurricane over but seas still wild and the steering cable broken, and Lindy too small to handle the emergency tiller, he had somehow stayed on the helm two days straight. He had recited poetry and sung to himself while she tried to keep him going with a quart of coffee a night.