The chart table light dimmed and almost died, so that he could no longer read. “Let me by?” Lindy asked again.

“Christ!” He squashed himself against the chart table and she squeezed past.

“Put down ‘stove lamp,’ too,” she called back, from somewhere forward. “I can never see into the pots on the stove.”

Anger, despair at the whole mess he had got them into, clutched at his throat. He had begun fighting every change she suggested. This one he simply ignored.

“Oh,” she said smugly. “It’s leaking, like you said it might.”

“What’s leaking?” Dismay settled into his bones. His shins ached. He was afraid he was coming down with flu.

“The skylight.”

“It’s just condensation,” he begged.

“Drip ... drip ... drip...” she intoned, looking aloft. “Is that condensation?”

He crawled forward and reached up, feeling along the varnished molding. It wasn’t condensation, it was a leak. Well, he couldn’t caulk it now, and when it stopped raining he probably wouldn’t be able to find it. He put it on the list, making 350 items. Hiring help was not the answer; there were only so many carpenters, painters, and mechanics a forty-foot boat would hold, and none of them gave a damn how they fouled things up below.

Lindy had collapsed, sitting dully on a bunk. Until they had light there was nothing more, really, she could do.

“It’s all just so goddamn much,” she quavered. “We’ve done more fighting in an hour than we did all year!”

He had no answer. He went topside and tossed a wringing-wet tarpaulin over the skylight. It stopped the leak but killed what remained of the light below, so they could work no longer anyway. It was raining too hard to sprint for Dugan’s filthy public shower, so they sprayed each other with Right Guard, dressed over their own sweat, and crossed the Bridge to have dinner at the Club.

They had really nowhere else to go.

Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

At 3 P.M. Papeete time, he was fifty-four miles northwest of Moorea, bearing down for the second time on the spot at which he had discovered her gone. Clinging to the spreader, he was especially alert and very apprehensive.

He was entering, again, the area in which he had pitched over the flag and the strobe light. Three hours northwest, he had sailed, until dawn: then three southeast, and no flag. Three northwest again, and now three southeast, and still no flag. He wondered if it had drifted further downwind than he.

Searching his horizon minutely, he became conscious of a distant white speck. It was no whitecap, for it remained. He raised his binoculars and trapped it in their circle of vision.