The cat is sleeping with Lindy below. It hears the chirping rudder cable. It slinks topside. Lindy notices that it is gone. She worries She moves quietly through the main cabin so as not to awaken him. She puts on her safety harness and goes topside. By starlight, she sees the cat ready to spring on the spray-slickened lazarette hatch. She has no time to clip her harness to a shroud.

She lunges to save the cat and slips. She plummets screaming into the wake, while he sleeps on. She strikes out for the trailing hawser, grabs it, slips astern until her fingers grasp the plastic buoy. It comes off in her hands.

All this the cat observes bored and uncaring.

“You sneaky fucker!” he yelled. The cat flicked him a glance and re-riveted his attention on the chirping hatch. Despite the press of time, he found himself stalking the predator. The lazy slant eyes turned toward him. At the last moment, the cat stretched, eluded him, padded around the lazarette hatch just out of reach. It moved with dignity to the dinghy. It leaped to the canvas cover and lay down, licking its fur.

“You bastard!” he screamed. The cat looked up and yawned.

Mitch came out of it. Aghast, he turned and swung down the companionway to the cabin. He did not know what he had intended to do. Toss it overboard? On no evidence? Maybe. He had somehow to get control of himself.

He reached automatically for his sextant and then remembered. He rummaged for the ancient spare and found it in its antique, pie-shaped mahogany case, made in Calcutta. He remembered, in vivid color—and this was a symptom of fatigue, too, the colored memories—the tiny store in a Copenhagen alley where she had found it. He felt again her triumph when he had stepped outside to test it, using the Town Hall clock as the sun, and reported it usable.

He checked it now on the horizon and found it still accurate, although the figures engraved on its inlaid silver quadrant, by some Cockney craftsman a hundred years ago, were so tiny and worn that they were hardly readable.

He squinted at them in the dim light. He could not read them at all. He had four minutes left before Local Apparent Noon. He laid the sextant on the chart table and began hurridedly to rub the tarnish from the arc.

At dawn, three days before they were to vacate their home, he had awakened in their carton-cluttered bedroom. Gray light edged the slats of the Venetian blinds; the curtains had already been packed for storage.

A bird sang from the porch railing below. He recognized the voice. He would probably miss it, though he had never taken the trouble to go to the window to see what kind of bird it was.