He rummaged through the navigation drawer and found a seven-dollar pair of glasses he had bought in Papeete from a Chinese druggist, who had selected them, solely on the basis of his age, from a crate on the pharmacy floor.

Combining the glasses with a magnifying glass, he read the altitude. The vernier was marked in seconds of arc, which no navigator had used for fifty years. He converted the reading to decimals, checking his work at every stage.

His sweat fell in huge greasy drops onto his sight-form, smearing his calculations. His dividers, parallel rules, and the chart grew moist. The cabin was suffocating. He would not take the time to undog the ports after last night’s spray.

He moved his running-fix forward on the chart to give himself a noon position, the first solid fix since she had been lost. It was close to his D.R. Good. He was putting pencil, plotter, gum-eraser, and nautical almanac away when the bulkhead clock chimed eight bells.

She had been in the water now at the least for nearly nine hours: at most, for almost twelve.

The water was warm, eighty degrees now at noon, no less. And she had the jacket, and perhaps the plastic container.

Somewhere in the rear of the long double rank of books jammed on his bookshelf was a Navy publication he had liberated after Korea: Survival at Sea. In it lay predictions: water temperature versus survival time. He moved to find it, and paused.

If he looked up her chances and found that she was statistically dead, it would mean nothing anyway. The tables were drawn for men, not women, and everyone knew that women were more buoyant, fattier, hardier in the water.

In his first Honolulu Race, a crewman from another boat had been rescued after four days in a lifejacket by a passing freighter.

Compared to the average US Navy man, or yachtsman, Lindy was a fish. She outlasted him on every swim, was warm in the water long after he had crawled shivering up the boarding ladder. She was in perfect health. She had just survived, on a forty-foot boat, the worst hurricane to hit French Polynesia in fifty years. She had probably put on three pounds in Bora Bora after the storm. Three pounds of fat could add hours to her body heat.

And if the Navy tables decided she was dead, what was he going to do anyway? Abandon the search?

He didn’t want to know and couldn’t afford to take the time to find out. He tried the radio again. He thought he heard a voice come back, through crackling static. It was too faint for him to distinguish even the language. He dashed topside, wiped spray from an insulator on the antenna, tried again, but heard nothing now.